


Storms That Haven't Happened Yet

by thegables



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, M/M, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, a fan fiction about scenery, a time honored tradition we call 'trying to fix twilight', also vampire ""teens"", is almost impossible when people can read my minds but i'm doing my best, it can't be done and yet, midnight sun did not Solve My Problems so yet again here we are, no seriously like the slowest burn, some age appropriate consensual teen sexuality, too many adjectives
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2020-10-05 09:29:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 25
Words: 54,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20486648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegables/pseuds/thegables
Summary: The story of Twilight if Alice's first vision had been of Bella Swan, if Jasper was perfectly suited to calm Edward's tortured moods, if the novel was mostly about being moody near trees, and everyone talked about moral ambiguity all the time. So it's Twilight but gay and flowery.





	1. Chapter One

Other versions of the story get it wrong, because they neglect to mention that Alice’s first vision had two parts. First she saw the vampire—dirty blond hair falling over one eye, skin dusted with bite scars, a look of once-unshakeable certainty fading in his expression. Then she saw the girl.

Visions she was used to, but not the absence of pain, and also not clarity—and the first part of this vision had both. She knew, with great confidence, that he was a vampire. She felt a frightening commonality. She heard the vampire’s voice in the vision—low, forceful, with a Southern accent more clipped than those she knew from Mississippi. She heard his name, Jasper, and half of the last name too. She felt a malevolence from him, too, although it was as uncertain as his expression. She saw the time and the place she would meet him, only a few days from the present, and she saw them traveling together, resting in barns and silos, in a northwesterly direction, doing strange things to animals, and maybe to people. Just when she was overwhelmed by fear and confusion, the vision shifted, and she saw the girl.

A girl with dark hair flowing over her shoulders, pale skin, dark, unreadable eyes. All this was blurrier—no name, no species, no place. But the girl was looking out into deep, ferny woods, as if on the hunt for a predator, and then she turned and looked at Alice with fear and want in her face. She said something, with definiteness garbled by the vision fading. Alice felt flooded, unmoored. She wanted to take the girl out of the woods.

Just when she was about to move toward her, the vision flickered and bled together, so the vampire’s eyes were superimposed over the girl’s, his icy, scarred skin becoming her skin. The integrity of the two figures was lost. There were too many red eyes, falling into each other. The vision fluttered and ended; Alice was looking up at a copse of cork oak trees. She got up and began to search: she didn’t need to search for Jasper, because she already knew how she’d find him. She had to search for the girl. Alice got up and walked, with a strange, silky speed, into the cluster of oaks. She got up _thirsty._

~~~

This was only Jasper’s third time hunting animals, but Edward knew—knew for a fact—that Jasper didn’t need him to go along. Edward was in the business of knowing things as fact. But his supply of facts, when it came to Jasper Whitlock—or rather, Hale, newly Jasper Hale, unfortunately now twinned to Rosalie, for reasons that Edward didn’t care to understand, but they made sense to Carlisle and Esme—that supply was rather low. He stood off to the side and watched Jasper lock eyes with a gigantic reindeer, both of them circling each other, neither of them looking away. Edward didn’t know how his mind worked. “Don’t play with your food,” he said after a minute, just for something to say.  
Jasper didn’t flinch. He had an extensive physical vocabulary but flinching wasn’t in it. “It’s awful generous to call this food,” he said, eyes trained on the reindeer, and then, with a degree of resignation, he pounced.

Edward was a student of his approach, because it differed from everyone in his family. Jasper had not Emmett’s brunt force, nor his pleasure in the attack. He had not Carlisle’s medical efficiency, always attuned to specific arteries, or Rosalie’s relish in swift, neat killing. Esme’s no-nonsense approach, without performance or bravado, belied her extreme skill. Edward guessed from his family’s thoughts that his own hunting was remarkable only for his speed. Alice insisted upon hunting alone, and she didn’t think about it much, so he didn’t know a great deal about her style. Jasper, in contrast to all of them, the newest Cullen, or at least the newest Hale: he hunted with the landscape. Everything was tactical. He cornered reindeer and caribou and grizzly bears against riverbeds and boulders and stands of trees, when they were below the tree line, and then he entranced them with his special skill. Edward still didn’t have a grasp on the contours of the skill. And when he pounced? He was elegant, fierce, cold-eyed, ruthless. Edward was reminded that being a Cullen-style vegetarian was still a compromise. Something was still losing its life. To be this and to be a true vegetarian—to truly respect life in all its forms—was impossible. Jasper reminded him of this. His eyes were only now starting to dim, muddily orange. Like a polluted sunset.

Jasper drained the reindeer and rose from the turf. _Abysmal_, he thought but did not say. Edward and Jasper had not known each other long, so there was no way to know whether he had meant Edward to hear it. There was a timbre to Carlisle’s thoughts when he was “speaking” to him, and to Esme’s and Emmett’s too. Rosalie often spoke aloud, all the better to be pointed and arch. Edward didn’t know whether he was an unwelcome or forgotten visitor in Jasper’s thoughts, though he couldn’t do anything about it either way. His thoughts generally were anxious, restless, curious, frustrated, protective, of Alice, mainly, and thirsty, always thirsty. He worried about his control. Edward worried about it too.

Jasper left the carcass behind him and walked past Edward in the direction of home. “Are you finished?” He asked. “Did you get something while I was busy?”

Edward was glad as always that mind-reading didn’t go two ways, that Jasper couldn’t know that he hadn’t bagged an animal for himself because he had been watching Jasper. Afraid all the time that a hiker or hunter would happen by and become the incontrovertible evidence of Jasper’s novice self-control. Of course, as Carlisle and Emmett always reminded him, they were in Alaska for a reason. The area was extremely remote, especially now in late winter. Alice had foreseen late and ongoing snow, extending their safety period, but Edward wasn’t convinced that Alice’s visions could be trusted. She was so young, still learning about her gift and about her new existence. But she didn’t have the same struggle with self control that Jasper did. After her first six months with the Cullens, she’d adapted entirely, since she’d hardly known anything else. Jasper, who was older than Edward—he’d seen the better part of the nineteenth century—had longer habits to break. His desire to change was sincere, Edward knew for sure, but he also knew how weak his resolve could be. He was doing it for Alice, more than anything. Jasper had never articulated it but this was his private suspicion. When he confided this theory to Carlisle, his father had said, typically theological, “And does it matter why people come to do the right thing, in the end?” But the trouble was that Edward always _knew why._

“No, not yet,” he said. “But I’ll be quick."

“Oh, I know,” Jasper huffed under his breath, and grinned.

Edward sometimes dreaded hunting, and he always forgot how running like that, running after something else, helped him forget himself. Caribou, however, were vegetarians, and tasted terrible. Both of their thoughts focused on this as they ran home.

When they did, they encountered Kate and Tanya Denali, sprawled out on the snow in front of the lodge. Edward could hear Carlisle thinking about a book inside, and badly wanted to go up to talk to him, but he slowed politely, as did Jasper.

“Hello, boys,” said Tanya, as if she had stumbled upon them accidentally instead of lying in wait. Edward sometimes felt like Tanya was inviting him to play a game to which he did not know the rules, and now was too late to learn.

“Why, soldier,” Kate said, languid and at ease, with which Kate was always an act, “I do believe your ruby-reds are fading.”

Some of Jasper’s old stiffness returned to him, replacing the bright-eyed, loose-gaited Jasper of the hunt. Edward was sad to see it go. “Well, Miss Kate,” he said, “I’m being very adherent.”

He never said _Miss Alice_ or _Miss Rosalie_. Edward didn’t know who he was betraying and not knowing was making him crazy.

“How does caribou sit with you, soldier?” Tanya asked him, but her eyes flicked back to Edward.

Jasper looked at Edward too. He could see from Jasper’s view of him that he was visibly impatient, which was rude. Jasper said, so politely that it hurt, “Ma’am, I am not a soldier anymore.”

Edward’s heart leapt a bit at this for no reason.

Kate’s eyebrows shot up. “A lover, not a fighter?”

“_Kate_,” Edward barked.

“Oh Kate,” Tanya said, “They may be adherent but they’re certainly not _playing along_.”

“We never claimed to be,” Edward insisted.

“You could try it sometime,” Kate said. “The nights are long, and very cold.” She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse, reclining against the snow, and she faux-shivered for his benefit.

Jasper turned to Edward and tilted his head, thinking, “We might as well get along.” Edward, shocked, would have been ready to perceive his acquiescence as a betrayal were it not for the fact that it was the first time Jasper had opened his thoughts so pointedly.

His hackles up, he said, “I’d like to go inside. Good evening, ladies,” and went in without waiting for his brother.

  
~~~  


Carlisle and Esme were sitting in the study at the top of the house. Carlisle was reading a book about heart surgery and Esme was looking out the big picture window at the stars. She got up when he came in, and when she saw Edward’s expression of protest, touched his shoulder and said quietly, smiling, “There’s good sometimes in a tete-a-tete.” She took her own book and went silently down the stairs.

Carlisle closed his book, smiling for a moment after his wife. “Those Denali girls,” he said without turning, “don’t mean any harm.”

Edward grimaced. “‘Girls’ is generous.”

“Isn’t it in our best interest to be generous?” Carlisle and Edward had been carrying on these half-silent conversations for so long, so many decades, that they had the rhythms of speech. “In general, but especially to the Denalis. There are so few who share our way of life.”

“I though Tanya coming after me was enough. But now Kate is making her intentions known to Jasper.”

Carlisle considered this. “I had noticed,” he said. “But does it matter if Kate fancies Jasper? In that case, does it matter if Jasper fancies her? I presumed that he might have been most attached to Alice, but perhaps that was hasty on my part. What do you know on the matter?”

What Edward knew on the matter was that Alice, beyond all reason, thought only of the human girl from the vision, and he didn’t know for the life (and death) of him what Jasper wanted, other than—well. He said, “I—don’t think Jasper thinks of Kate in that sense.”

“Well, then.” Edward sensed an intimation of impatience from Carlisle, an extremely uncommon feeling, and one Carlisle quickly tried to repress. Edward was ashamed for witnessing it, in addition to causing it. “It wouldn’t be the end of the world, you know. It makes a certain sense for Jasper—or you, for that matter—to date a Denali. Although—.” He stopped short but Edward knew what was coming. Carlisle made a familiar wry expression, which meant, _I wasn’t going to say, but since you know anyway…_

Edward’s voice was thin. “Do you really think it’s best to go?”

Carlisle frowned. “I don’t claim to be certain what’s best. But it seems foolish to stay out here in the wilderness, far from a hospital. I really feel I should be using my skills to be a help to people. In this town in Washington there’s a hospital, severely understaffed. I think the sacrifices would be worth it for the lives that might be saved. I’ve talked it over with Esme. She agrees.”

Invoking Esme, who would seldom disagree with Carlisle, and to whom Edward was devoted, was a cheap trick. Edward scowled.

Carlisle went on, “And I know your brother at least will be happy to be in school again, to rejoin the culture as it were.” Carlisle obviously did not mean Jasper.

“As will Rosalie,” Edward muttered. “More admirers for the fan club.”

Carlisle frowned more deeply, and then said, very measured, “Have your own objections, if you like, but make them on their own terms.”  
“I’m sorry,” Edward said, meaning it. None of this had anything to do with Rosalie.

“You know, you are under no obligation to come along. You’re free to do what you like, you know that. We happen to enjoy your company, but that’s immaterial if you really want to stay here.”

Edward grimaced. “I have no desire to leave this family, you know that. And it’s not me I’m worried about.”

Carlisle turned toward the window again and rubbed his chin in what Edward knew was a studied human gesture. Carlisle had been a vampire so long that he was almost more human. He had been relearning, readapting, for so many years. “Go on,” he said, more gently.

Edward had assumed that he would draw on a great reservoir of evidence for his point but when he went to access it his mind was blank. Finally he said, desperate and vague, “They’re not ready.”

He heard, rather than saw, Carlisle’s eyebrows go up. “You’re including Alice in that.”

“Well. She is the newborn.”

“Alice has excellent self control, we’ve seen that. And Jasper?”

“Jasper wants to be safe, to restrain himself,” Edward said. “But he’s not ready to be around humans full time. In school, I mean, the close quarters—.”

Carlisle turned back to look at Edward. “Is it knowledge of his thoughts that leads you to these conclusions? Or is it an evaluation of your own?”

He examined Edward’s face closely, the scrutiny making him squirm. If he could blush he would. Finally he said, so quietly that it felt like an admission, of something he didn’t know what. “I know him. I have to protect him from himself.”

Carlisle’s face was troubled. “Alright,” he said, although it was clear he was still confused. “But the man is nearly 200 years old, Edward. The oldest person here, save me. We’ve got to take his word if he says he can go.”

“He’ll go for Alice,” Edward blurted out. “He feels a responsibility to keep her safe.”

Carlisle was thinking that this was a parallel to what Edward was alleging himself, but the implications were too unpleasant to pursue, so Edward shut himself out of his father’s head as best he could. Carlisle said, “Well, I think that’s as good a reason as any. We’ve all tried to follow the straight and narrow in the name of a woman, haven’t we?” He tried to smile.

Edward smiled too, wondering if, for the first time in 80 years, Carlisle’s maxims were wearing thin. He didn’t know who he’d be if that were true.

“Come with us,” Carlisle said. “Help Jasper, help Alice. Go to school. Maybe you’ll even make some friends?” This was a better joke; they both grinned. Edward nodded, acquiescing. “Well,” Carlisle said, and clapped him on the shoulder, moved to turn off the lights, to follow Esme to their room, probably, “you never know who you’ll meet.”


	2. Chapter Two

Edward went downstairs too, to Alice’s room on the second floor. The house was a new construction, a big yawning cabin-style mansion with huge clumsy exposed pine beams and proliferating dark knots in the honey-colored wood like moles. There was a moose taxidermy hung in the great room, an artifact that had prompted Emmett to say upon first seeing it, “I would’ve done a neater job myself.” None of the Cullens were particularly inclined to the style of the house, but it had room for all of them to have privacy, and it was temporary. Alice’s room was in one corner on the second floor. She’d hung big tapestries she’d made out of dyed bedsheets to cover up the too-bright faux rusticness of the wooden walls, and she had a bed, in which she liked to recline and listen to CDs, or sit up and sew, or lie on her back next to Edward or Jasper and talk about the future. Alice didn’t talk about the past. “That,” she was given to saying, “is not my specialty.” 

Edward had been hoping to talk to her alone, about Washington, but he found Jasper in there with her. They were playing pickup sticks, an exercise made protracted and faintly ridiculous by their extreme motor skills. It looked as if they had been playing without speaking for some time, each with a fistful of removed sticks, but the original tangle of tossed sticks remained intact. Neither was thinking about much but the game, either. Edward wasn’t sure whether this was a method of distancing themselves from their thoughts, or distancing him. As Rosalie loved to remind him, he was a mind reader, but he was not a psychologist. There was a great deal he didn’t really have access to.

They looked up when he came in, twin gestures, and he felt a clench of protectiveness toward them, his new family members, two creatures more vulnerable than he was, although perhaps more tough. Alice made eye contact and thought, “So we’re going.”

“We’re going,” Edward said aloud. “It’s in Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula.”

“What’s wrong with Canada,” Alice mused. “It’s not a criticism, just a question.”

“We don’t have citizenship,” Edward reminded her. “No papers.”

“Carlisle doesn’t have _American _citizenship. He was born in England in the year three hundred and four, you think he’s got an original birth certificate?” She shifted over minutely in two lithe movements to make room for him on the rug. 

“Alice,” Edward said, but his heart wasn’t in it. 

“When?” Jasper asked. He had gone very still, still even for a vampire. 

Edward opened his mouth to say, _not sure yet_, but Alice, eyes fixed on the far wall, answered instead, “Next week. A little town on the Olympic Peninsula. Edward, where’s that?”

“You should know,” he said fondly. “West of Seattle, in the rainforest.”

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “Obvious things to recommend it.”

“What’s that?” Jasper asked, his eyes flicking from Edward to Alice. 

Edward explained, “Most overcast days of anywhere in the continental US, more like here, really. The more overcast days, you know—less _glittering_. Less standing out in town. In _school._”

“In school?”

“School,” Edward confirmed. He didn’t mind so much going himself, but he was concerned about what it meant—not only for Jasper, with nascent self-control, but for Alice, whose thoughts had turned abruptly to her vision. “Don’t get any ideas,” he said to her, more harshly than he meant. 

“Did you know, Jazz,” Alice said archly, turning away from one brother to another, “that Edward Cullen is the only person allowed to have any ideas?”

“My ideas aren’t about fragile human _girls_,” Edward said, again more harshly than he meant it. 

Alice frowned at him, patient and thoughtful. Silently she said to him, “You don’t give me any credit. Who said I was going to be risky.”

“Nothing’s riskier than this,” he said aloud. “It always starts with a _talk_.” 

Alice pouted. “I’m a little offended you don’t trust me more,” she thought. 

Edward grimaced. “I _care _about you too much for that,” he muttered. 

Jasper had been very quiet. “I like,” he said, his Texas accent suddenly palpable on that last, long vowel, “when you two have your little mystery silent talks. It’s so peaceful.” 

“When _you two _do it,” Alice said, “I hate it. I hate being left out.”

“Us two!” Jasper objected, glancing at Edward, who received this glance like a rebuke. 

“He can’t see the future,” Edward said, as if that clarified something. 

“No, but I can.” Alice whirled up in one twist to stand over them on the floor. She attempted to make meaningful eye contact with Edward that he absolutely refused to accept. “We’re moving up and out, boys. Or down and out, I suppose. South.” Then she left the two of them alone. 

With martial precision, Jasper folded forward and removed another precariously placed pick up stick. A shock of dark blond hair fell over his right eye, but he didn’t tuck it back. As he stared into the sticks, he said quietly, “You’re awful hard on her.”

Edward didn’t immediately reply because he knew it was true. Finally he said, “When will I learn how to _protect _her without being _hard _on her?”

Jasper looked up, his eyes muted and peach-colored. Edward knew that he will filling the room with relaxed affects but it still worked. “Does Alice need your protection?” He asked, wry and gentle. 

Edward sputtered. “You don’t know what she’s thinking.”

In two invisible moments another stick was in Jasper’s hand. “Tell us, then.” 

Edward’s chest felt tight, though he was beyond the physiognomy that made such things happen. “I don’t muck around in people’s heads for fun, you know.”

“Oh no.” Jasper sat back, victorious, with a handful of glorified toothpicks. “Just for _surveillance_.” 

This stung badly. “Would you like to be characterized as an emotional manipulator, then?”

Without any provocation the rest of the sticks collapsed flat onto the rug. Jasper collected them with one swipe of his hand. “Well,” he said, a restrained smile audible in his voice, as if to say, _I know better than you, but I won’t say so, _“Can’t argue with the truth.” He stood and left the room, leaving Edward in his sister’s space alone, wondering how he could manage to alienate everyone in his family in half an hour. 

It hurt more to be told by _Jasper _that he was surveilling people unfairly, because Jasper was probably the only vampire he knew who did not use his power for evil. Jasper made rooms calm; he made animals sedate; he made panic dim and awareness increase. Because of his own ability Edward was very attuned to how and when Jasper used his power—what Alice called his “affective effects”—and he only used them in kindness. Or at least, he did now. Edward tried not to think about his history, about the Confederate Army, about indiscriminate killing, racism and murder running alongside each other. He tried to put it out of his mind, remind himself how deliberately Jasper had changed himself. The trouble was that, unlike Alice, the past sort of _was _Edward Cullen’s specialty. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! We should switch to Forks and Bella's perspective in the next chapter, stay tuned...


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting so far! Two chapters this time, as this one is a little bit of a transitional section (/"that's the name of the show" meme.jpg) and I want to keep each chapter in a distinct perspective. On to good old Bella Swan next.

At the end of that winter, Alice and Edward explored Washington by car, and then on foot. They’d bargained with Carlisle to keep up the homeschooling charade a little longer, and so they had long rainy and sleeting days to drive and drive. Alice anticipated when a paved road would turn into a dirt one, and when it did, they got out and started to run, slow enough absorb the landscape. Sometimes it was taxing to be with Edward, because he was always _in your head_. Alice suspected that it taxed him too, because she was the only person who could, to a certain, future-oriented degree, respond in kind. Sometimes she liked to be with Esme or Emmett for the simplicity of their company, and sometimes Jasper, because of his quietness and his instinctive ability to calm her worry. But Edward was a truer companion. He was the only person to which she didn’t have to find _words _to describe the things she saw. That wasn’t taxing at all. They ran for hours through old growth rainforest and caves made of moss and rocky beaches. They hunted deer, and less abysmally, mountain lions, but more often they hunted _views_. They climbed the tallest spruces and cedars they could find, overlooking the Columbia River Gorge or Puget Sound. One day they ran to Mount Rainier. On another they swam to a huge rock formation off the coast, from which First Beach, on the Quileute Reservation, was visible. But they couldn’t go there. 

Alice was developing a method of focusing so hard on an obscure moment of the future—a vision of a park bench, or a premonition about weather—that Edward couldn’t accurately read her mind. She knew it was hurting his feelings, making him feel shut out, and that he knew it was unreasonable to feel this way. But she was doing it for his benefit. He had to know too much already. Sometimes the good things were as heavy to carry as the bad. She didn’t want him to know about Jasper, or what would—might—happen. So she showed him the weather in February and he told her about the past, especially the Cullens’ past. Edward was a thought historian. Alice was a visual archivist of storms that hadn’t happened yet. It balanced out. When she saw Jasper looking at Edward, and then away, Alice was careful to think about the future’s most mundane possibilities, and he was, to her relief, more or less oblivious. They passed a few weeks in this way until they couldn’t avoid going to school—climbing big trees, waiting for the human girl to come. Really, the best way to keep Edward out of her thoughts was the fact that Alice mostly thought about her. 

But she didn’t see her, not at first. Esme said to her, fluffing the throw pillows, “the real problem with visions is not foresight, but getting your hopes up.” She’d been going out of her way a lot to show Alice that it was alright to daydream about a girl. The rightness or wrongness hadn’t occurred to Alice personally. Ethics were Edward’s domain, and Carlisle’s. It was the image that stuck with her: the girl’s dark hair swirling over her shoulders, breath fogging in the cold air, pale lips making some kind of tentative accusation. Or maybe a promise. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me on tumblr, at thegables.tumblr.com for pictures of trees and gates, and lesbianedwardcullens.tumblr.com for, well.


	4. Chapter Four

Bella Swan moved through Forks, Washington as if in a fog, which meant possibly she had gotten her metaphors mixed up. Sure, the rain fell every day, dispiriting enough, but it seemed to _rise _around her, like a mood, dampening her hearing and clouding her perspective. The place was too loud with pitter-pats and too quiet with moss and ferns and no-bookstore-no-Cheesecake-Factory small town quietness. When she remembered that she was doing this for her mother—and, in a more limited way, for Charlie, who needed her more than she’d realized—she felt both braver and sadder. What she wanted was to be distracted long enough for the fog to lift, but she couldn’t find anything that could accomplish this until her first day at school. 

The cafeteria, resplendent with flags on the walls, half of them upside down—feeling stupid in a bowling shirt, surely the wrong choice although who was there to see it—trying not to let the boring enthusiasm of Jessica what’shername overwhelm her. Then: them. A little crowd of beautiful people, alike and not alike. Bella catalogued them with unexpected interest. First a massive athlete with dark curly hair, then a tall girl with flowing icy blonde hair, beautiful to the point of distraction. Then a dirty blond boy with a baseball T and a scholar’s expression, engaged with effort and concentration, and then a tiny girl, her dark hair all gelled curls and spikes and slumps. The kind of hair belonging to someone who has something to say. Bella, who habitually had nothing to say, who was habitually not speechless but _wordless_, took note. The small girl poked her elbow into the scholar’s side and said something inaudible. Then, last of all, a slighter boy with auburn hair and the expression of a pretty martyr. 

“_Who_,” Bella asked suddenly, finding her words, “_is that_?”

“Oh,” Jessica said. She smiled as if she had finally alighted on the topic that could make Bella her best friend. “Wouldn’t you like to know.” 

“I mean, not particularly.”

“All I’m saying is, when it comes to _the Cullens_, don’t bother.”

Bella had long planned to restrict her bothering to the strictly necessary, so she thought she would be able to fulfill this expectation and get along alright. But then, helplessly, she glanced up at the lunch table they’d settled around, and the auburn-haired boy was looking at her, and then, caught, looked down at his untouched lunch. The dark-haired girl—“Alice,” Jessica supplied, she was supplying all the names—said something low and urgent to him. Edward. Bella had the names learned in a moment. “They’re all _together,_” Jessica said, interrupting the reverie.

“No they’re not,” the other girl, Angela, said. “Just Emmett and Rosalie. I don’t think Edward and Alice are together like that.”

“No, I meant Alice and Jasper. I always thought Edward was sort of—.” 

“Jess!” 

Bella was genuinely unsure whether Jessica had been about to say something like “frigid” or something like “gay.” She was interested either way. “Sort of what?” She asked, cringing at her own eagerness. 

“Sort of—mysterious,” Jessica finished, a cop-out. 

Bella risked another look at the boy in the gray T-shirt; he was still speaking with a kind of fervent control to Alice across from him. “He looks unhappy,” she said. 

“I know,” Angela said, and then, faux sighing, “It’s Byronic, isn’t it?” Bella did her best to join in on the laughter. 

~~~

Sometimes how it is is that you’re feeling sensitive, overtired, but you’re alright—until you stub your toe or miss a freeway exit and feel dangerously, suddenly close to crying. A kind of explosive fragility that sneaks up on you. This was Bella at the _start_ of her first day at Forks High School. By after lunch biology she was teetering already, and nothing precisely had gone wrong. The wrongness, she reflected with a moroseness that impressed herself, was too generalized. Wrongness in generality, all around. 

Then she realized she would be lab partners with Edward Cullen. From the moment she walked into the room, he carried a kind of bodily tension that made her muscles tremble sympathetically. He inclined his shoulders far away from her and did not speak. All day she’d been contending with the unwanted and intent attention of boys in the school and now the only boy who was different from them _loathed _her. It was the inexplicability that bothered her most. How would she survive this school—or anything else—if she couldn’t manage how people perceived her, or even anticipate it?

When the class ended he bolted from the room. Bella packed up and left more slowly, and by the time she got outside, he wasn’t visible in the hallway. Was it possible to reframe this by thinking him only rude and unkind? She tried to manage this through disastrous gym, mostly failing, longing for the privacy of her room. When she finally got out to her truck, Alice and her blond brother, Jasper, were getting into a car, a a carefully maintained antique coupe, right next to it. The other Cullens were nowhere in sight. Jasper was distractedly jabbing at a flip phone but Alice glanced up as Bella approached, her mannerisms quick and delicate and elegant, a little too fast. When she saw it was Bella, her face opened like a window. “Oh,” she said, her voice clear and bright. Cloudless. “You’re everywhere today, aren’t you?” 

Jasper had gotten into the car and shut the door but Alice stood against her open one. She was wearing a long rain jacket made of pale pink and yellow waxed canvas with stripes of clear plastic mixed in. She stood very still, waiting for Bella to answer. Her eyes were hazel—no, not quite, something else. Up close she was very pale, scary pale, with dark circles under her eyes. Still she was so pretty that it was hard to think. She looked… Bella borrowed a word from an acquaintance in Phoenix. She looked _editorial_. Fashionable in a way that required something from the viewer. 

Bella didn’t know how to answer the question. “Just trying to figure out the school.” 

Alice looked as if she was restraining a smile. She had not introduced herself. “It’s not so hard to navigate, is it?” She said. “Bella?”

“How do you know my name?” She was realizing that Edward, the sulking villain, could have told her, but even so. 

“I know we’ll see each other around,” Alice said, and then, as she began to get into the driver’s seat, gave Bella a little two-fingered salute, jaunty and ironic. Then she disappeared into the sleek German car, pulled out, and wove through the slick parking lot very fast. 

~~~

The next day Bella dreaded and looked forward to biology, so that she might clear the air with him, ask him what his problem was. But at lunch the rest of the Cullens filed in without him—or, no, Jasper was missing too. Just Emmett and Rosalie, wrapped up in each other, and Alice, her hair full of butterfly clips. Were they worn ironically, a 90s throwback, or in complete childish sincerity? Bella had missed the part of her social education where she could use someone’s clothes to understand their character. She herself was wearing jeans and a thick navy sweater and sneakers; was this revealing in some way? She tried to study Angela and Jessica’s clothes while they talked about an upcoming dance, but they were opaque to her. 

She was picking up her lunch tray to take it to the trash when a paper airplane, crisp and elegant and aerodynamic, finished a clean arc in her lap. She looked around but nobody nearby seemed to have thrown it. The airplane was impossibly light in her hands; she unfolded it carefully with the abstract desire to be able to refold it. It was French homework completed in tiny cursive. At first Bella thought this was the only content of the airplane, a coded message she’d need an hour and a pocket dictionary to decipher, but then she turned it over. On the other side of the lined paper was a note, addressed so as to not leave doubt of its audience. “Bella,” it said, “Rule biology today. Rule it forever.” It wasn’t signed. 

Bella looked up; Jessica and Angela were staring at her. “Secret admirer?” Jessica said, with an edge of dread in her voice. 

“Mystery advice, more like,” Bella said, confused. She looked up from the paper sharply, all at once, to try and catch the sender looking. The cafeteria was full of unconcerned strangers. She read the note again, the tiny, spiky cursive. Suddenly she realized that the dot over the first I in the message was a tiny butterfly, a millimeter high, so small as to be mistaken for a haphazard dot or heart. That was enough to mount a theory. 

~~~

Edward Cullen wasn’t in biology. Bella finished her lab first in the class. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Back to Edward and Jasper next, I think. What I've learned is that being in Bella's head is *terrible,* at least my version (I think accurately) is extremely depressed, cerebral, and pretty superior. Let me know what you think! 
> 
> (yes I am convinced Bella Swan likes the cheesecake factory, this is the level of discourse i'm on.)


	5. Chapter Five

Carlisle did not urge him to stay, his faith didn’t extend that far, so that night Edward ran north, out of Washington, through Canada, and into Alaska. He ran through the Denali wilderness, within twenty miles of where his family had lived for two years. But he kept running, and reached Coldfoot by sunrise. The snow was thick, but oil trucks barreled through every once in a while. Edward remembered suddenly that Coldfoot, this isolated non-place that was the only point of human entry to the Brooks Range, was the last place that Tanya Denali had ever killed a human. A trucker, probably, he couldn’t recall. _Afterward_, she’d said, her eyes golden now, and far away, _I looked at him and felt sick, sick like I haven’t felt in a hundred years at least. _

So you were just done? Edward had inquired, polite curiosity. 

She’d smiled at him, reliving an epiphany. Just like that, she’d said. Funny, isn’t it? Just kicked the habit.

The trouble was that nobody ever really kicked a habit, forever. You just staved it off. If you were lucky you staved it off until you died. If you weren’t lucky, you were a vampire and did not have that reprieve to look forward to. 

Alice had said to him, if you kill Bella Swan her dad will die too. She’s all he’s got. This was galvanizing advice but Edward was not thinking about Chief Swan. He was thinking about Carlisle, sitting behind his faux mahogany desk at the hospital, his face grave and white. “If you’re that afraid, by all means, go,” he’d said. “You know yourself.”

“Not anymore I don’t,” Edward had muttered. 

Carlisle thought but didn’t say, _You’re frightening me_.

Edward swallowed. “I don’t want to kill her,” he said, which depending on your translation of _want _was either a lie or it wasn’t. 

“I know you don’t,” Carlisle said. “So if you need to go, go. What does—.” He screeched to a halt. He had been about to say, _What does Alice see_ but he found his answer on Edward’s face. “Go,” he said again. 

So Edward ran through Denali and through Coldfoot and then north into the Brooks Range, toward the Continental Divide, trying not to kill Bella Swan. He was climbing a sheer rock face overlooking the Anaktuvuk River when he heard a distinctly human sound—or rather too distinct, a vampire sound. He was preparing to rebuff Tanya when he realized who it was. Jasper flew past him up the face and sat waiting for him at the top, looking over the mountains and tributaries extending as far as even a vampire eye could see. Jasper was wearing what he had been wearing to school the day before, his hair wet and chaotic from his run. Edward couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard his thoughts during his pursuit, but he had been rather preoccupied. 

“Now that we’re here,” Jasper said, and it was a shock to hear a voice, “maybe we can finally hunt some grizzlies.” 

“They’re endangered,” Edward said robotically. His eyes were trained on the furthest peak he could see, slate-colored, sleek and exposed, in the distance. 

“_We’re _endangered,” Jasper groused. “Dirty oil companies, snatching up our hunting grounds.”

“Dirty pro-human ethics,” Edward said, sort of meaning it. 

“Ex_act_ly.” Jasper was managing half a smile. 

“Is it worth it?” Edward asked, genuinely curious. He had spent an unsettling amount of his time in Bella Swan’s presence considering that it might not be worth it. Only seeing Carlisle’s face so troubled—only Esme—. 

Jasper had gotten up and was crunching snow under his shoes as he explored the mountaintop. He returned in a moment with a caribou shed the size of a first grader. “This is somebody’s land,” he observed. 

“The females shed in the winter,” Edward supplied. 

In Jasper’s head was playing images of the indigenous community he’d come across in the tiny town in Anaktuvuk Pass while hunting Edward. A kind of continuity that was difficult even for immortals to contemplate, the vastness of such a contract with a place. “That’s not what I meant,” he said. 

Edward, ashamed, said, “Oh, yes.” 

Jasper left it there, coming to sit down again beside him. He did not evidently intend to speak again. In fact, his mind was curiously empty. But it was still there—habitable, present, tinged with affects—not like Bella’s, which was flat and smooth and shut him out. 

“Why did you follow me?” 

Jasper sighed, and squinted a little as he looked out over the landscape. They were hundreds of miles from trees. Here there were rivers and drainages and mountains and tundra and snow, each in abundant quantities, and little else. It was so stark that it felt lush again. Jasper didn’t think before saying: “Chivalry.” 

Edward turned surprised eyes on him. 

Jasper tried to squash his smile. Even before squashing it had been a sad one. “Carlisle said,” he began again slowly. Edward loved the way a drawl dragged over the second syllable of that name, a name intended to be spoken by seventeenth century Englishmen. If you had to be an anachronism, you might as well do it with Texas style. “Carlisle said that you probably wouldn’t listen to anyone else.”

Edward grimaced. “You’re guilty by association.”

“That’s too kind. I’m guilty enough. You know that.”

“We’ve all done reprehensible things. But I—thought that I had left that behind me. I guess I’d become complacent.” 

“I look forward to that stage.”

“Don’t.” 

“Edward—.”

Edward’s eyes had squeezed shut. He was remembering vividly the plausibility of killing Bella Swan, killing witnesses, drinking her blood. He was remembering Alice’s face from the moment he’d set eyes on her that afternoon. ”I really thought I wasn’t going to be able to keep myself from doing it.”

“But you did.” 

Edward sighed. He looked at the caribou shed, something that had so recently been bone and blood and velvet, now quickly turning to lichen. He was still thinking about his father, usually so full of axiomatic advice, simply telling Edward to _go_, as if nothing could be done for him. “What did Carlisle want you to tell me?”

Jasper deliberated this for a moment. “I think he probably wanted me to listen.”

Edward felt a clench of painful affection, whether for Carlisle or Jasper he wasn’t sure. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know what to say.” 

“We’ll both listen, then, I expect,” he said, so they did, letting the wind ricochet and ring against them just as it rung through valleys and peaks and hollows. It felt good to be part of a landscape. If it wasn’t for love and care for Esme Cullen, thought Edward absently, I could be a rock formation forever. I could stay here. He wondered if he, like a caribou shed, could become asymptotically like lichen, always almost but not quite. It somehow felt like the biology might work. But it wasn’t just for Esme or for Carlisle that he had to go back, or at least do something. Something had shifted. He needed to look out for Alice, and for her to look after him, probably. He would miss Emmett and Rosalie too. And Jasper—well. Jasper had changed his life, down to the marrow. Down to the iris. The least Edward could do was to keep Bella Swan alive. 

~~~

The next day they ran to the Arctic Circle. Edward suggested that Jasper might need to be getting back to school, and Jasper gave him a look that said, _don’t be absurd_. It was exciting to think of how little Jasper cared for school, for the charade at all, really. He had spent more than a century not pretending to be a teenager, doing something besides trigonometry. He talked about the past only in generalities. Once Edward had heard him say to Emmett in a rare serious moment, “With the things I’ve done, I could probably only limit the damage by never going there again.” Emmett, whose transgressions and self reflections were few, had been mystified by this, but Edward understood. While they stood on a bit of tundra at the top of the world he said to his brother—or whatever Jasper was, the term _brother _didn’t quite cover it, “Did Alice say anything before you left?”

Jasper turned his face away. “I didn’t stop to find out. I left as soon as I knew where you’d gone.”

“But?”

“There was some—_anxiety _in the house. That I could feel.” 

Edward felt terrible about Alice. She’d barely met Bella, apparently the subject of such a galvanizing powerful vision that it had marked Alice’s life as a vampire, and here he was threatening murder. “I feel terrible,” he said, redundant and dumb. 

Jasper made a slow, complicated smile that indicated, Edward knew, that he was trying to think what to say. Jasper’s thoughts were so often clouded with feelings, his and other people’s, that made his mind hazy and difficult to read. He said, “I know,” but he said it gently. 

“Do you think she wants to—” in embarrassment and squeamishness Edward turned to his father’s vernacular. “Do you think she fancies her? Alice fancies Bella, I mean.” 

Jasper kicked a tussock of tundra grass. “They did meet at the end of school. You were already gone. Bella was—” he was smiling “—reticent.”

“Reticent! Jasper, I _can’t read her mind_.”

Jasper looked sharply over at him, surprised. “I know,” he said patiently. “But I don’t know why. In any case, Bella was reticent. Alice was—self-controlled, really. But her heart was beating pretty fast.”

This was a Jasper vampire-neologism for one of his emotional sensitivities. Alice’s heart didn’t beat, but something in her heart was fluttering. Jasper was not a very literal thinker. Perhaps being so sensitive to feelings, he couldn’t be. 

“I see,” Edward said. 

“Don’t worry too much about Alice. Alice is incidental. All you have to worry about is, well. Self-control.”

Edward reflected that he had been worrying about self-control for 80 years, and where had it gotten him? To the top of the world, missing Trigonometry, putting creases in Carlisle’s uncreasable face. “What am I going to do?” He asked after a moment. 

“Damned if I know.”

“But you came to Alaska.” Edward thought belatedly that he should not have pointed this out; it was too revealing of something. 

Jasper considered this. “Something about it seemed extremely reasonable to me. It’s very American, you know. We tend to go into the wilderness, especially the Western wilderness, when we are afraid or in doubt.”

“And pretend to conquer it,” Edward said ruefully. 

“Yes,” Jasper’s voice was low and softly accented and slow, slow. “But you and I? Well. We're not pretending. And we’re not conquerers anymore.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing about Alaska and the Brooks Range was inspired by one of my favorite writers, the hiker and author Carrot Quinn. Check her out on Instagram or her blog at https://carrotquinn.com/2019/08/26/the-haul-road-to-anaktuvuk-a-bit-of-the-brooks-range-in-gates-of-the-arctic/. 
> 
> I'm also learning from Carrot to be more thoughtful about land acknowledgments and indigenous history; the land near Anaktuvuk Pass belongs to the Nunamiut Inupiat people! 
> 
> Thanks for reading.


	6. Chapter Six

The next day Edward and Jasper went back to Washington, somewhat—well, freezer burnt. The day after that, having hunted very thoroughly, they went back to school. “How—” Edward had asked Jasper, unable to finish, asked his friend the king of struggling with temptation. 

“First, you don’t,” Jasper had said, “and then you keep not.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say.”

Jasper had tilted his head. “I think I know what Alice would say.”

“What’s that?”

“You could try being her friend.” 

Edward had two first thoughts: one, that trying to befriend Bella Swan would probably sign her death warrant, and two, how _restful _it would be to have a friend whose thoughts he couldn’t hear. What an idea: a quiet kind of company. Not alone but lonely, thought-lonely. Peace. Finally he said, “Alice is a teenage girl.”

Jasper arched an eyebrow. “_Exactly_.” 

~~~

Edward thought that it was more or less inappropriate for him to befriend a teen girl, even in the aim of harm reduction. Rosalie, for her part, reminded him that in body “and maturity, shitbrain” he was a teen boy. Alice didn’t chime in; her inner monologue _was _mostly about Bella’s safety, but when she first saw him, wind battered and muddy, she said aloud, “I missed you.” 

When they were alone, Esme said to him, “I tried to convince Jasper not to go. He’s behind in history already.”

“Jasper was there when the history was being made,” Edward pointed out. 

Esme’s eyes were fond and gentle on him, a kind of understanding and warmth that he probably didn’t deserve. “We couldn’t convince him not to go after you. He said nobody understood how you were feeling like he could.”

“Jasper understands how everyone is feeling all the time.” Edward was aware he was being a dick. _What, _he asked himself, _are you running from now? _

“There’s supernatural empathy,” Esme agreed, “and then there’s the good old-fashioned kind. Jasper has both.” 

“Old fashioned empathy?”

“The kind you only get from sharing mistakes. And you want to just—_upload_ your insight or your lesson learnt to another person, but you can’t. They have to learn it on their own. And you just have to watch and understand. Empathy.” 

Edward looked at her, pretty and remote and self-contained, backlit by the dim gray light that filtered through the wall of windows in the Forks house. He knew from her thoughts that she was being perfectly sincere. “Why are you telling me this?” He asked. 

She laughed, helpless. “I don’t know, darling. You tell me. Let Jasper tell you. I am not the number one authority in piercing insight in this family. No. Only this: try to empathize with your teenaged self, alright? With all his faults. You’re carrying him around. And based on the circumstances, you can’t put him down anyway.”

The tenderness she had for all his worst parts made him emotional in ways he didn’t have outlets for. Probably he needed to go play the piano. “For you,” he promised her, and couldn’t say more, just stared out at the river without blinking. She softly cuffed the back of his neck and went upstairs. Later he suspected she had been trying to tell him not about shame, but about desire.

~~~

Edward had butter-yellow irises. Jasper, who had been on a high alert against risk all year, wore a matching pair. They had not found a grizzly but had been reunited with their favored disappointing large mammal, the caribou. So they went, yellow-eyed, alongside the more moderate Emmett, Rosalie, and Alice, to school. Alice said to him, “You’ll be fine,” but she meant this as reassurance, not in her professional capacity. 

At lunch, the period before biology, Edward’s anxiety was ratcheting up. He looked over to Jasper, about to say, _I’m afraid _or _This is asinine _or _Let’s go back to Denali _or _I don’t care if I feel fuzzy, give me the best stuff you’ve got_. He was trying to catch Jasper’s eye, and having difficulty, and then finally he focused enough to tune out the other noisy thoughts in the cafeteria and heard Jasper reminding himself not to breathe when he passed the gymnasium. Exercise raised everyone’s blood pressure. Jasper had to be careful, careful. He was plotting out his schedule to minimize danger; he was as tactical here as he was stalking a caribou. It was like reading a monk’s diary of temptation. Edward retracted his attention immediately. Belatedly Jasper saw him looking and tilted his head, said aloud, “Yes?”

Edward, ashamed, said, “Nothing,” which fooled no one and enticed no one to further questioning. Bella Swan was staring at him; who could blame her? Trying to read her mind was like hitting your car’s bumper, softly but by accident, against the cement front wall of a garage. He stopped trying. What would it be like to turn things off—thirst and listening and desire? What would it be like to stop? 

“Edward,” Rosalie said, towering over him, “time for class.” 

When he was beside Bella in biology—Edward at the far corner of the table, his throat on fire, his skin tight over his knuckles—he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself before. I’m Edward Cullen.” 

And she said: “I know who you are.” 

He frowned. “I was afraid of that.” 

“Why?” She was small and pale and had slightly messy dark hair. The pull of her blood was nasty and powerful, a savory riptide. 

Edward hadn’t had a conversation in many years without the deepest, most probing sort of unfair advantage. He didn’t know how answer an opaque question; he never had. Finally he said, trying not to breathe in, “I’m afraid my rudeness is becoming notorious.” 

“I was curious,” she said, smiling tentatively. “But I wouldn’t go that far.” 

“I had to go out of town,” he said, and then ran out of air. He needed to learn to pass off taciturnity as mystery.

“Ah,” she said. “I’m Bella Swan, by the way.” 

The superfluity of such an introduction made him grimace, which she definitely noticed. But he had to risk a breath. 

She said, suddenly cautious—maybe she was discerning, at last, how dangerous the situation was—, “I did meet your sister. Foster sister?”

“Sister,” Edward said, confused. This had not been part of the briefing. Alice had not been thinking about it, which made no sense. Alice thought about Bella in the abstract a great deal—and yet Edward hadn’t been even peripherally aware that they’d talked. He wondered if he’d been betrayed or broken. Maybe he was losing his touch. “Wait—Alice? Or Rosalie?”

Bella’s eyes were wide. “Alice,” she said. 

“What did she say to you?” Edward realized too late that he was being too intense. 

Bella looked as if she was pretending to have to try and remember something. “She told me,” she said carefully, “that I have no future.”

“_What_?”

Bella pulled her lips into her mouth for a moment, making her face small and white. Then she let them go. “That’s okay,” she said, and reached for the microscope. “I think she meant it as a compliment.” 


	7. Chapter Seven

Edward and Alice had most of their fun conversations—the conversations that were speculative and abstract and joking and storytelling—in treetops. Treetops and rock formations off the coast and mountain caves. This was not a fun conversation, so they had it in the garage at the Forks house, the moment after arriving home from school in separate cars. “Alright,” she said mildly when she saw his face. 

Emmett said, “Take a walk, man.”

“I’m fine,” he informed them brittlely. “I just need some information from my _foster sister._”

“Did you know our adoption was unsealed, Jazz?” Alice was standing between the Volvo and the Jeep, wearing vintage Levi’s and a black blouse with intricate, avant-garde cut-outs, her rain jacket open over it. “Do you think we’re going to have to go back to the orphanage?” 

Jasper, halfway into the house already, turned back and looked at her, then Edward. Silently he said to Edward, “she’s a teenage girl.” 

Edward ignored this, pretending he hadn’t heard, but he couldn’t ignore the plaintiveness of Jasper’s regard, nor the way he’d turned, solid and still and controlled, in the doorway. His hair and shoulders were wet because he’d waited for Edward, leaning against the car, after the last class of the day. 

To Alice Jasper said, “You don’t think they could get rid of us now, do you?”

Alice considered this, her head cocked to one side. “Since I am, since January, the primary breadwinner,” she said precisely, “I think not.” 

Edward looked at Jasper again, not quite able to help himself, and felt an unsolicited surge of patience move through him, which he would have been exasperated about if he’d had the capacity. As it was, he sighed, as Emmett and Jasper went inside. Rosalie had ignored the entire conversation and gone in immediately. 

There was a mechanic’s set-up in this four car garage, presided over by Rose and occasionally Esme, including a big counter on the front wall. Alice went and sat on the counter, cross-legged, then folded forward, elbows on her knees, chin on her fists. Unlike Jasper’s general habit, she spoke to Edward silently. “So,” she began, raising her eyebrows to signify a silent dialogue, “you didn’t kill Bella.” 

“Alice!”

“That was the major concern of the day, wasn’t it? I told you you’d be okay.” 

Fair was fair, but Edward felt fragile and wounded, even through the haze of Jasper’s rented calm. “She told me that you said some extremely eccentric things to her.” 

Alice’s eyebrows shot up. “I didn’t see _this_. I didn’t see a summit between the two of you.” _Predator and prey,_ she was thinking too, but not at him, quickly trying to suppress the thought. When you spoke aloud it was easier to keep your words and thoughts separate, even if he could still hear them. Alice rarely took this precaution. 

“I don’t know where to start.” 

Alice sat up straight and said, “At the beginning,” in such a keen impression of one of Esme’s famous phrases that Edward wanted to smile. 

“How did you start talking to her?” 

She shrugged. “I parked next to her. Told her I liked her jacket.”

Bella’s jackets were atrocious. “You _did not_.”

“Nobody’s asking you to understand how girls communicate, Edward.” 

“There’s only one part I want to understand. You told her _she had_ _no future._” 

Alice was surprised. “She told you that?” She was twisting a thin hemp bracelet around her wrist. Edward remembered Jasper, his jacket studded with frozen condensation, saying, “Her heart was beating pretty fast.” 

“I think you confused her to a fair degree.”

“Well I meant it _metaphorically_. Well. I mean, I didn’t. But that’s how I meant her to take it.”

Edward considered this. “I’m not sure she did.”

Alice, who had slouched again, stood up straight. “You mean she thinks I’m a psychic.”

“You’re not psychic, precisely.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“I don’t know what she thinks! I don’t know what Bella Swan thinks, Alice. This is the whole problem.”

Alice was smiling, but her thoughts were tangled. Confusingly, she was thinking in large part about what Bella thought about _her_. 

“I knew she’d be the end of us somehow.”

“I’ll take this route. The slower one. Over—you know. Murder.” 

“Alice!” 

Alice was staring out over the cars toward the garage doors, falsely contemplative. “I can’t believe she told you that.”

Edward took a deep breath. “Was it true? Was it because you see me—.”

Her eyes jumped back to his, wide and startled. “Oh! No, no, that’s not what I meant. That’s not what I meant by _no future_, I didn’t mean dead. I meant that I can’t see it.” 

“What?”

“I mean, not all of it. Some of it I can see—the original vision, it comes back sometimes. I can see glimpses of her life. But not with any clarity. And I don’t think it’s just because she’s _indecisive._” 

Edward, exonerated, came to sit on the counter beside her. Though they were inside the shut-up garage, both could hear the precise moment it started to rain, and slowly grew to a downpour. “Indecision can be a way of life, you know.”

“If you mean about yourself, that’s ridiculous. Even I know that.” She pushed her shoulder into his. “And I haven’t known you that long.” 

“Bella Swan has no future,” he mused, redirecting. He didn’t want to think about his own indecision, or to hear what she was thinking about it. 

“I don’t think you’re going to kill her. I can’t be one hundred percent sure, but I don’t think so.”

He looked sideways at her. “I don’t think so either. But I’m afraid, still.” 

He wasn’t sure why he’d expected her to have more concrete solace to offer. She was, after all, a teenage girl. “Yeah,” she said. “I don’t like having my visions hampered like this. I got used to them already.” 

“She’s ruining us,” Edward said again, but he suspected that if they could be ruined by a concrete wall of a girl, they were ruined to begin with.

“Don’t be dramatic,” she said automatically. Then, “Edward? I want to ask you a research question.”

“Mm?”

“It’s about epistemology.” 

“Episte—what kind of teenager are you?”

“One who doesn’t sleep.”

“I’m not convinced that’s a distinguishing factor.”

“I’ve got a lot of reading time. Epistemology.”

“Go ahead.”

“How do you _know _that you like someone? In that very particular way that American English doesn’t have a word for, so you get reduced to saying, ‘like-like.’”

“Fancy,” he supplied. “The functionalities of the British.”

“How do you know when you _fancy _someone?” 

How did she always find the questions he was absolutely least equipped to answer? He sighed, loud and demonstrative. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I did. Ask Rosalie. Ask Esme. I never really have done it, so I don’t really know.”

She leapt off the countertop in a single, feline movement, landing on her feet. She was wearing platform sneakers that were as weird as they were, ostensibly, cool. She looked exactly the same age as Edward and she was 80 years younger than him. Sometimes that seemed like no time at all. In all likelihood vampires did not know how to inhabit time correctly, which was to say, how to _use it up_. “But you’re so aggravating. That’s a lie,” she said. Then she turned and ran into the house. 

~~~

The next morning the Cullens and Hales were late to school because Emmett, Jasper, and Alice were skating in their smoothest shoes on patches of ice that checker-boarded the driveway, laughing and falling and skidding at top speed. Edward and Rosalie, the killjoy siblings, waited in the car. He turned on the heat very slightly because it was what a human would do. Rosalie, staring with ladylike rage out the window, said, “Everything about this endeavor is risky and stupid.”

“The ice?” He asked stupidly.

“Everything but the ice.” 

In biology, Edward tried not to breathe, and learned about Bella’s family and her life in Arizona. When she said that she did not like Forks he was surprised to realize that he sort of did; he liked the tree cover and the noise and bulk of the logging trucks and the wet fern-and-moss softness of the woods. The school was too small for anonymity, maybe, but he’d been through that before. He looked at Bella, who to him represented nothing more than a temptation to worst instincts, to a kind of virally transmitted ruthlessness. To Alice, something else: desire of at least one kind, and vulnerability. Gayness, even. A tethering to the human world she’d so recently left. He looked at the arc of Bella’s neck, the slim set of her shoulders, her uneven lips. He supposed he was able to _measure _her as pretty, but he wasn’t experiencing it. Perhaps this was what Alice had been alluding to in the garage. He didn’t want to think about it. Edward did not have much use for the question _what do you mean_, because he usually already knew. That or he was afraid to find out. 

After school he waited by the car for Jasper, who had waited for him, so this was allowed. The parking lot was still frozen in some places, slick and nearly invisible, but this hardly occurred to him. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the image of two heads of dark hair close together across the parking lot—Alice and Bella, the latter slightly the taller, her hair falling over her shoulders while Alice’s stuck out over her ears. Edward was just close enough to feel the edge of Alice’s thoughts, which were engaged in their conversation, something about a book. There was something absolutely treasonous about Alice’s shoulders, the way she held them. He suspected he was not allowed to find fault in this. He remembered Jasper saying in his quiet, unflappable way, “You’re awful hard on her.” Where _was _Jasper? Was he seeing this? 

Violently another set of thoughts pushed through Alice’s more distant ones. Tyler whatshisname was losing control of his car on the ice. He desperately tried to correct, and then had to swerve again to avoid another car pulling out, sending his car careening off in the wrong direction. A bolt of fear went through Edward when he saw where the van was heading—right at Bella and Alice, now 30 feet or so away from him on the asphalt, trapped between an old sedan and the oncoming van. Edward could not risk anything bad happening to Bella Swan. Neither could he risk streaking across the parking lot to—what, stop the van with his bare hands? If only Alice saw what was coming, she could yank Bella out of the way rather innocuously at the last moment. Tyler’s judgments were certain in their chaos; Alice should be able to see this. He scanned her thoughts and they were _empty_, not absent but just empty of content, empty of fear. She did not see the van careening toward them. The situation was impossible. Edward couldn’t allow Bella’s blood to be spilt. In a fraction of a second, he dashed across the parking lot and, quite neatly, he thought, stopped the van with his shoulder, in the process knocking Alice clumsily to the ground. Bella, pinned against the sedan, was white with fear and unhurt. In the immediate aftermath Edward’s head filled with the disjointed apologies of Tyler and the exclamations of the other students in the lot. He was looking at Bella, trying desperately to hear her thoughts, but he got only her expression, canny and knowing and afraid. It made him sick. Then he turned to Alice, whose eyes were wide with panic, the kind that came from knowing exactly what a near miss it was, and her own part in it. _Edward_, she thought, _I’m sorry_.

Bella, faintly and mildly, said, “I think I hit my head.” 

“It’s not bleeding,” Edward said, with certainty. He was afraid to touch her. He leant back on his heels a little and pushed the van a few inches back. He could smell Tyler’s blood from a small cut; his thoughts signified that he was not badly hurt. The fresh blood in the open air held absolutely no temptation for him; it was like stale coffee in an airless hallway. Bella, her skin unbroken and her back flat against the sedan, still tempted him more. 

It occurred to him suddenly that this was not a universal promise for Forks High School’s vampires. His heart was in his throat. “Alice,” he muttered, “take Bella to the hospital to see Carlisle.”

“What?” Alice and Bella said simultaneously. But Edward was gone, running as fast as he safely could, toward the door that would admit Jasper from his last class. When Jasper finally emerged a moment later, oblivious, Edward said through his teeth, “Don’t breathe,” and pulled him by the wrist until they were running together past the gym and then the cafeteria, the wrong out of school, into the woods. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe Edward Cullen will stop being such a dolt someday??


	8. Chapter Eight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for my absence! I'll try to post more soon.

Later, while they waited behind paper curtains for Carlisle, Alice wondered suddenly whether her ability to judge human fragility was already so ruined. She had tried to convince the teachers and school nurse who had rushed over that Bella was not badly hurt; she had barely hit her head, and her shoulder. But it was possible that she had already lost her gauge of how those things hurt. Empathy—the human kind, not the Jasper kind—required experience, queueing up a memory of hurt, and Alice couldn’t remember bumping her head very well. She was alienated from the sensation. 

Edward had said, “Take Bella to see Carlisle,” and then _dashed_, so quickly it was almost comical. Alice didn’t know whether he had suggested Carlisle for medical consultation or for a revision of the truth. She was angry with her brother, because she was angry with herself—his selfishness, his moral code, her selfishness, her unholy allegiance with a vulnerable third party. Did it still count as selfishness if you saved somebody’s life? Did they cancel each other out?

Alice hoped Edward had _dashed _for a good reason, and she suspected she knew what it was. 

Bella, beside her, perched on the exam table in her flannel and jeans, bit her lip. Her hair was tangled and staticky, her eyes dark and clear and incisive. When Alice looked at her she always thought, _oh, trouble, trouble, trouble. _Bella was worrying the button at one of her shirt cuffs with her fingers. Edward had called her a cement wall girl; Alice thought that Bella Swan was probably a high garden gate. 

Bella said, “How am I going to convince him that I’m okay?”

“Carlisle?” Alice said, surprised. Hypocrisy came easy. “Just tell the truth.” 

“What if I’m not a reliable narrator,” Bella mumbled, not really a question, but Alice couldn’t chide her because the curtain opened and Carlisle was here, clean and crisp and rational in his white coat. 

“Hello,” he said, measured and carefully affable. “We’ve got here—Isabella Swan, and hello, Alice.”

“Just Bella,” Alice said automatically. Bella’s eyes flashed to her. 

“Bella, got it. What happened at school today?” He was very studiously asking Bella and not Alice. 

Bella said, “There was an accident on the parking lot because of the ice. One kid almost ran into us with his van. He would’ve, too, if it wasn’t for Edward.” 

Carlisle was shining his little flashlight in Bella’s eyes perfunctorily. “Is that right?” He said. 

“I have no idea how he got over to me so fast.” There was a fact-finding mission in Bella’s voice, a little journalistic edge. 

Carlisle was giving cement walls a new image. “That’s very lucky,” he said, impressively bland. “And you hit your head?”

“Barely at all, I told the nurse, I’m fine.” 

Carlisle glanced up to make innocuous, empty eye contact with Alice. “And Alice wasn’t hurt?”

Bella turned to look up at Alice over her shoulder. “She got knocked down but she insists she’s fine. Didn’t you scrape up your hands?”

“No,” Alice said shortly. She was thinking about how Bella might have been hurt if Edward had not stopped the truck. The truck itself she might have survived—the consequences of having her blood spilt in that parking lot? Almost certainly not. She knew what Edward’s incredulous look had meant; _why didn’t you see this_? She’d been so goggle-eyed that Edward had had to save Bella from himself. 

Deeper in Alice’s mind was the question of whether she herself would have been able to contain her thirst if Bella had bled so close to her. She wasn’t as dangerous to her as Edward was, but her self-control was so new. 

When they were alone, putting on their jackets, Bella said, “Your dad is very… young.” 

“Well, we’re adopted.” 

“Still, young to adopt a lot of kids.” Bella’s glances at Alice were canny and watchful. Alice had no margin for error. Desperately she groped at the girl’s future and got a collage instead—cedar trees, soft sweaters, math homework, tears, petrified trees washing up on the beach, and blood. 

“Carlisle has an altruistic streak a mile long. He loves strays. So does Esme.”

“Your mom.”

Alice nodded shortly. She knew she should keep Bella on this topic so she wouldn’t get on to anything else, but she didn’t feel like making conversation. 

Bella’s features were bleached out by the floor to ceiling windows in the hospital hallway, her features flat and smooth and ageless. It was spooky. She said, “Are you a stray?” There was gentleness in her voice tempered by a kind of overpowering curiosity. Underneath her question was a deeper, ontological one: _what are you_? 

Alice scowled. “Yes,” she said. “In all definitions but the pertinent ones.”

Bella turned her gaze upon her. “What would be more pertinent?”

“Bella—.” Saying her name felt dangerous; it felt dangerous in that it revealed more about Alice than it did about Bella. It felt impossible to lie to her—impossible because undesired, impossible because of level of difficulty. She was too canny. She said finally, “Don’t ask me questions that I can’t answer.” 

Bella bit her lip. “Then you’re not going to like this next one.”

Alice delicately gritted her teeth.

“How did Edward stop that truck? We both know there’s no version of physics that can account for it.” 

Alice had been prepared for the question and it still unnerved her. “How do _you _think he did it?” 

Bella shook her head, abruptly irritated. “Don’t play that improv game with me,” she said, her voice low and serious and taut. She had a relatively deep voice, which was soft and worn in, like old jeans, when she was happy, and full of steel when she wasn’t. In either context it was totally itself, unvarnished with performance or affectation. Oh _trouble_, Alice thought. Bella went on, “Don’t answer a question with a question.”

Alice decided to answer the question in its most literal spirit, the only kind in which she could answer honestly. She _didn’t _know how Edward had stopped the van without giving into one kind of temptation or another. “I don’t know.”

Bella, her chin jutting out in resistance and disbelief, turned away. Her hair had not recovered from its encounters with the rain and sleet and asphalt and doctor, and Alice found this more appealing rather than less. Bella said, very low, “If you want to be friends, you have to tell me something. I understand the circumstances are complicated—.”

Alice, who had never precisely admitted the circumstances were complicated, panicked internally. But then she had been willing to make proclamations about Bella’s future. It felt insulting to not tell this insightful, contained, observant person the truth. And yet the truth was beyond Alice’s powers of comprehension, though it had happened to her. She looked at her friend across a chasm of disclosure and difference and felt absurdly emotional. “I do want to be friends,” she said. “Edward did something that he shouldn’t have done. He was trying to protect you.”

Bella’s pulse was quickening; Alice could hear it easily. “And what,” she said carefully, “of his future?” 

Edward’s future was far clearer to Alice than Bella’s. She could see it laid out in front of her when she closed her eyes. She did this now. “He’ll be your friend,” she said.

Bella was surprised but nonetheless considered this a diversion. “_Are_ you my friend?” She asked, that journalist edge coming back with a new kind of urgency. 

“Yes,” Alice said, so desperately that she felt her real meaning was readily obvious. “I wish I could say more.”

Suddenly Bella’s expression changed. “But you can’t,” she said. “I don’t understand, but I do. If you can’t, you can’t.”

“I wish I could.” Alice felt bizarrely hysterical, like the day had only now taken its dire turn. She took a slow breath. 

“Well,” Bella said, turning, her face illuminating dimly with a half-smile, “We’ll have to muddle along like that for now.”

“For now,” Alice repeated, unsure whether it was a threat or a promise. Her hands came up anxiously to tuck her hair behind her ears. As she did, Bella came forward and caught her left hand, the one that had skirted the pavement as Edward pushed them out of the way of the van. Bella’s hand felt scorching hot and very, very soft. Alice hadn’t touched a human hand hardly at all, as long as she’d had to delineate them as human hands. Bella’s fingers drew Alice’s hand away from her head, fingers splayed. The hand was self-evidently unmarred in any way. Bella drew a crescent shape over Alice’s curving heart line. She didn’t look at Alice’s face but her heart was thundering. She let the hand drop and said, quietly, “Would you take me home?”


	9. Chapter Nine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is so long coming and is full of self-indulgent analytical nonsense and probably plot holes. But it's full of gay pining too, and well, we've come this far. Thanks for reading!

When Edward ran with Alice he climbed mountains and trees; they liked to see far, they liked to survey a place. He had the same instinct when he was alone, as he’d thought he was in Alaska. But today, running in the woods with Jasper away from school, he ran _deeper_. Jasper ran beside him without asking questions, a kind of patience and trust that made Edward nervous. Finally Jasper more or less cornered him, high in the hills, in a narrow passage between two rock formations covered in moss. The fog was thick on the hillside and the cedars just as thick. It was early afternoon but looked like dusk, and there was a little snow on the ground. “Why are we running?” Jasper asked. He did not look, as he had in Alaska, like he was affably along for the ride. He was here because he’d been dragged. 

Edward found that he did not know how to answer the question. It required a kind of analytical thinking that felt very far away from him now. He was standing in his teen-drag clothes and sodden shoes, ankle deep in leaf litter and moss and fallen branches deep in the Olympic Rainforest. Jasper was taller than him. His hair, dark blond and tousled from the run, half covering one eye, almost glowed in the low light. When he put up his hand to press against the mossy rock that loomed over them, his scars glinted like scales. He did not repeat the question. He tucked his hair behind one ear with the other hand. He inclined his eyes to the canopy above, tilted his chin up to the ceiling of the forest. His chest was rising and falling, imagining the lingering of exertion out of long habit. While he waited for Edward to answer, a muscle in his jaw moved and slotted back into place. It occurred to Edward slowly that something in his life, or in his makeup, had gone fundamentally awry. 

Finally Edward answered the question. “There was an accident. Someone got cut.” 

Jasper’s face cleared. “In the building?”

“In the parking lot.”

Jasper’s face clouded over again. “That’s awful far from where I was,” he said gently, his accent thickening a little because he was distracted. “Was someone hurt bad?”

The image of Bella and Alice trapped between the two cars—Bella trapped—flashed into his mind again. “No,” he said. “Almost.”

Emmett would have been jumping over rocks and crushing tree branches, making _use _of the landscape, because he couldn’t stand still, but Jasper did just that. “You have to tell,” he said. 

Edward obliged, omitting the reason for Alice’s distraction. He tried to stay out of people’s heads, and when he couldn’t, he tried to keep other people out of them. This general plan worked less well with Jasper, who was not in anyone’s thoughts but on the edges of them, not so much lurking as keeping company. 

He listened to Edward’s story. Rosalie would have followed up first with: _what were you thinking_? Jasper asked instead, “Is Bella alright?”

“As far as I could tell, yes. She hit her head a little, I told Alice to take her to Carlisle. Perhaps they can use the excuse of her banging her head to explain what happened.”

Jasper looked incredulously at him, silent for a long moment, but then decided not to press. Edward was skirting the edges of his thoughts, very, very afraid to dip in. He didn’t want to know. It was a physical effort not to know.

Jasper went on, “And the boy who was cut?”

“Head wounds,” Edward explained superfluously, “bleed. He’ll be alright. It wasn’t severe.” 

Jasper nodded. “So you came to get me,” he said, slowly, processing. “To take me out of there.” 

This felt like an accusation though it was only a statement of fact. “I didn’t want either of us to do something we’d regret.” 

Edward’s anxiety wasn’t ebbing away, which meant Jasper wasn’t doing anything to abate it. In fact he looked very focused, on some silent conundrum Edward couldn’t know. Finally Jasper spoke again, as if he’d gathered his thoughts. “You were looking out for me. I’m curious as to why you thought I couldn’t withstand some spilled blood one hundred yards away, or why you couldn’t? Why did we have to run away?” 

Edward, confounded, repeated his answer. “I didn’t want either of us to do something we’d regret.” 

Jasper nodded again. “I don’t mean to be unkind,” he said, the soft slide of that last vowel unmistakable. Something inside Edward’s throat was hot. “But I am wondering how long you think running away will work as a solution. What if Bella had been cut? Could you run from that?”

Edward didn’t answer. 

“Will you go back to Alaska if you need to? Would you stay longer?” 

“Alright,” Edward cut in. “Going to Alaska was an extraordinary circumstance. I don’t know if you quite understand, because your thirst is so general. Mine _isn’t. _I always have things under control, it doesn’t bother me that much. And that girl came along and the pull was so fundamentally different. I was—I am a constant risk to her. I had to get far away.” 

Jasper tilted his head, and made his thoughts so clear that Edward couldn’t help hearing: _And yet you keep finding reasons to need to be close to her_. But he didn’t say it. He said instead, something wearing thin in his voice, “Do you really think your temptation is so exceptional?” 

Edward blanched. “No—” he began, but didn’t finish. 

Jasper went on, calm and curious. “Do you think you’re the only person who has suffered from an extreme desire to do the wrong thing? It’s not a unique phenomenon. Oh—I know, the Volturi have some fancy phrase for it, some Latin thing, about particular humans or specific blood aromas. I don’t think it exists.” He cut off Edward’s preparation to interrupt, as if he were the mindreader: “Oh, I know what Emmett says about it. I don’t believe it. Temptation is the rule, not the exception. Haven’t you learned that from 80 years of being a vampire? A pious one, at that.” He raised both arms and scraped his hair back over the top of his head. Because he was so calm, and so voluble, Edward knew that he was upset. 

“I think I understand something on the subject,” Edward said, curt and embarrassed. 

“I don’t mean to lecture you,” he responded, evidently dishonest, “but permit me to enter a theological mode for a second here. Think of Martin Luther, would you?”

Edward reflected that he should have listened harder during Carlisle’s occasional theological phases. “Well, explain at least.”

“I’m not going to get it exactly right. But he’d say that fighting temptation is the most natural constant task of human life. He’d call it sin. I’m not partial to that vocabulary myself.” 

“Why not?”

Jasper peeled a little bit of clinging moss off the rock closest to him, and then seemed to regret it, pressing it back against the rock. “Don’t believe in God. His lingo is limiting.”

“Fair enough,” Edward said. He was edgy. It was beginning to rain. 

“Fighting temptation is the basic task of living. Even when it shouldn’t be. Shouldn’t have to be.”

“What do you mean?” 

Jasper shrugged. “There’s different kinds, aren’t there?” Edward was beginning to wonder if his own anxiety was being amplified by Jasper, and unintentionally rather than otherwise. “Not all the same kind. Do you ever wonder if your pull toward Bella isn’t all about her blood? Are you tempted by her in another way?”

“No.” Edward felt like he’d been hit. 

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’m sure.” 

“Alright, then, alright,” Jasper said, but he wasn’t offended. Abruptly he scaled the rock face in two movements and sat on top of it, the way he had the sheer cliff face at Anaktuvuk Pass. 

Edward couldn’t bear to ask anything else without being able to survey his face. Jasper’s thoughts he was shrinking from, but he couldn’t shrink from the limited insight of his expression.He jumped to mount the opposing rock formation, a little higher than Jasper’s. He felt desperate for a kind of clarity that he knew he didn’t ultimately want. “What else does Martin Luther say?”

Jasper smiled, remote and handsome. “Do you want Martin Luther’s opinion or mine?”

Edward demurred to answer with a gesture. 

“I’ll give you mine. Every day we fight the temptations that threaten the most danger, to ourselves and other people. We gotta fight the temptation to _hurt_. But if you really dedicate yourself to the task, well. You might lose the capacity or the resolve to fight other kinds of temptation. It’s a finite resource. That’s my theory.”

“If that were true,” Edward said slowly, “don’t you think vegetarian vampires would be pure id in other arenas?”

Jasper shrugged, almost smiling for a moment. “Maybe it’s only a matter of time. Fossil fuels, diminishing reserves.” 

“That’s not nice to think about,” Edward said precisely. Dread was rising up in him. 

Jasper laughed out loud suddenly. “Did you come to me for things that are nice to think about? No. But tell me one more thing: you know, there’s more than one way to stave off hurt. Did you save Bella Swan’s life to to save her life, or to prevent yourself from being morally compromised?”  
The dread in Edward’s chest was fully formed now, sick and heavy. “It doesn’t matter,” he protested. “She’s alive.”

“Oh, well.” Edward got the sense that Jasper was preventing himself from saying Edward’s name. “You, of all people, should know how much intentions matter.” 

“Okay, if this is the system, did I do the wrong thing from pulling you out of school before you smelled the blood? Was that only selfish too?” 

Jasper looked up from his hands sharply. “I don’t know. You’d have to tell me. I’d be curious. But if I could be done in by a shallow cut across the parking lot, I shouldn’t be in school.” 

Edward felt himself turning fear into anger inside his ossified guts. “You don’t have to be, you know. You don’t have to be here, doing this charade, choking down elk at all. Is there any reason you feel compelled to?”

Jasper’s eyes, pale and carefully yellow, flashed fear at him. “I promised Alice,” he said. 

“I don’t think that’s all.”

“Well, how about you, Edward?” There, he’d failed. His will had failed. “Do you have any reason to be doing it either, beyond habit? If Bella was such a life-altering temptation couldn’t you have stayed in Alaska? Why don’t you run away? Why are you doing this?” 

Edward swallowed. “Why does anybody do anything?”

Jasper, finally angry too, burst out, “Don’t _do _that, don’t be a coward. _Answer the question_.” 

They were both standing up on their facing rocks now, six feet or so apart, eight feet off the ground. Their faces were barely visibly in the increasing dimness. Edward had never seen Jasper’s face so tense. His hands were in balled fists. Finally, feeling his heart pound in whatever set of metaphorical senses, Edward muttered, “Fine, then. Make me brave.”

Jasper’s chest swelled with an intake of air. He turned his eyes away, with effort. When he spoke his voice was too low for a human to hear, and very tired. “I wish I could make you understand how badly I want to,” he said. “But I’m not in that business anymore.” Then he took an orderly step forward and dropped off the rock, landed on the forest floor, and ran away, disappearing within moments. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follow me on tumblr at thegables.tumblr.com.


	10. Chapter Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Bella thought it was possible that this profound and elegantly shaped boy did not know what he was talking about."

When Jasper saw Alice sitting behind the wheel of her car around the corner from Bella’s house,he got in and growled, “Alice—read the future.”

She turned, unsurprised to see him, and said, “Can’t. Not so well anymore, anyway.” 

“All our skills are failing us,” he observed, more mildly than before. He sighed. “Why are we here?” 

Alice blinked. “I can read the future now,” she said. “You’re going to tell me why you’re in such a foul mood.”

“I can read it now too, all of a sudden. You’re going to tell me why we’re outside Bella Swan’s house like third rate private detectives. First.” 

“You’re awfully judgy for somebody who’s been skulking around so moony-eyed—”

“Alice. _First_.”

“Order of operations,” she bemoaned, “is so important to you. Well. Did he find you?”

Jasper felt he had earned the right to be obstinate. “Did who find me?”

Alice indicated with a look that his obstinance was at odds with hers. “You know who. He ran away so fast I figured it could only be one thing.”

“He stopped a van with his bare hands.” Jasper wasn’t sure whether he was confirming or marveling—and if marveling, either at the chivalry or the stupidity. Then he looked back at Alice and remembered that she was not really thinking about Edward Cullen right now. “Is Bella okay?”

She frowned instinctively. “Yeah, Carlisle thinks so. She hit her head but not that hard. The bigger problem I’m having is explaining to her what happened. She saw it all. Damn Edward, honestly, I mean, I know he was _trying _to help.” 

“He did help.”

Alice scowled more deeply, and turned her face away. “Don’t you think I know that? I can’t stand that I didn’t see this coming. I could have pulled her out of the way without a single theatric, and instead the king of Hot Topic had to come in and risk exposing all of us. I bet Rosalie is furious.”

Jasper, who didn’t consider Rosalie’s moods any of his concern, except when they fell under his professional purview, said, “Don’t be too hard on him.”

“Jazz!” She burst out. “He did this only to save himself. He didn’t want to have his _record compromised_.”

Jasper turned to look out the window at the rain intensifying. He said, very measured, very gentle: “Do you think I don’t know that?” Then, a beat later, “Two things can be true. Give him that, at least.” 

She shook her head. “Why he did it isn’t important. I think I got her to table the question for a minute, but she’s definitely on to something.”

“Rosalie’s gonna be furious,” Jasper said parodically, because he didn’t care. He was still wondering if two things could, in fact, be true. 

“I know,” Alice said, with significantly less irony. “But mostly I don’t want _Bella _to be furious. She knows I’m keeping something from her.” 

“Is that why we’re sitting around the corner from her house?”

Alice bit her lip. “I don’t know. She did hit her heat pretty hard—looked very pale. Ugh. Jazz.”

“Alice.”

“I called you here to help me leave.”

Jasper, responsibly, put on his seatbelt. She made a face at him. Finally he said, “You didn’t want to leave on your own.”

“It’s not _appropriate _for me to be skulking around outside her house. I’m just—_worried_. It makes me feel calmer to be close to her.”

Jasper recalled his recent fraught encounter in the woods. He could not relate to this sentiment. His feelings were a big paper map that had been refolded wrong. “Alright,” he said. 

“Alright _what_?”

“Do you trust Bella?”

“Trust her to do what? Trust her how?”

“Trust her, comma general.”

Alice made a theatrical exasperated noise. _She’s a teenage girl_, Jasper had reminded Edward so often. Finally Alice answered, “I do trust her, but I feel like I shouldn’t.”

“That’s anxiety.”

“That’s _why you’re here, Jasper, try to keep up for Chrissakes._” 

“Oh.” She should have said that. He wasn’t sure why he’d expected her to want him for his pep talk skills. He wasn’t doing so well in that department lately. With an intensity of focus he didn’t usually need, he calmed Alice’s mood. He wasn’t sure whether the work had carryover effect for him, or rather depleted his own reserves of calm. If anything he felt numb. He was thinking about the sensation of taking a step forward and falling off that rock in the woods a few minutes before. Not the landing easily on soft forest floor and not what he’d said before he’d stepped. Just the feeling of falling. 

Alice let out a long breath. “Thank you,” she said, and put the car in drive. 

They were quiet most of the way home. “If you want to know,” she said finally, as they drove down the long one lane road that led back to their house, “I can’t see anything about him right now. I guess he hasn’t decided.”

This sliced through Jasper’s chest more keenly than he would have expected. “I figured,” he said, his voice rough. 

“I can talk to him,” she offered, clearly feeling bad. 

“No, that’s alright. I don’t see—I know he respects your opinion. But I don’t think he’ll be able to hear it from anybody right now.”

“Hear what? What is it I would be telling him?” Alice wanted to know. 

Jasper let out a bewildered, overwhelmed low chuckle. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know at all.” 

“I’ll tell you if I start seeing anything more clearly.”

“Actually—you know? Don’t. I’m liable to get confused. The evidence always gets confused. Don’t tell me. I might as well be surprised.”

They were pulling up in front of the garage at the big Forks house. Both of them could hear someone, necessarily Edward, playing the piano upstairs. “I guess I’ll have to do the same thing,” Alice said. “I hate it.”

“Edward told me that you can’t see her future.”

Perversely, uncontrollably, Alice began to smile. “Bella Swan,” she said, something rising in her voice, “can’t be read. Can’t be predicted.”

Jasper, who had given away all his secrets, who had labored to heartbreak, perhaps fruitlessly, in the woods, said, “You know what? We should all be so straightforward and so self-controlled. All hail.”

Alice’s smile twisted. “Yeah,” she said. “All hail Bella Swan.” 

~~~

While everyone else went to biology, Bella found Edward Cullen sitting in the driver’s seat of his shiny Volvo, his eyes closed. She knocked on the window and he opened his eyes, saw her, and unlocked the car door without a real greeting. She sat in the passenger seat. He was listening to moody, early twentieth century classical music, which she liked. All drippy pianos and hysterical violins climbing up and drifting off. “Hi,” she said. Edward Cullen was ill mannered and shy and intense, all things she could get along with. He was so good-looking that it was almost humorous. Like when you look at a picture of Zac Efron and your eyes slide right off his face; nothing to hold onto. Edward’s face was more particular than Zac Efron’s and it was pleasing to Bella, extremely so, but it had no real hold over her. 

“Why aren’t you in class?” He asked. He smelled good and his clothes, she thought, were poorly chosen. 

“Ditching class is very healthy every once in a while.”

He looked skeptical.

“Surely you know this, since you’re ditching too.” 

He smiled. “I don’t know if it’s me you want to consult about health.”

“Well, our habits happen to intersect this once. Also—.” She broke off, both shy and baiting him. 

“What?” 

“Well, I was just going to say, I _personally _would consult you about my health, because you stopped a car from crashing into me with your bare hands.” 

He seemed eminently prepared for this accusation. “Bella, if you think about it—.”

She raised her hands. “I promised Alice that I wouldn’t push. At least for now.”

He was surprised. “You promised Alice.”

“It seemed important to her.”

“Don’t you want to know?” He asked this question too intently, but she didn’t flinch. She’d made a promise to herself about this. 

“So, so much,” she admitted. “But that’s about the size of things. I have to just, like… walk alongside a mystery for now.”

He considered this, perplexed. “That’s very insightful, and mature, for a girl of your age.”

She laughed at him. “Oh, what, compared to your superior wisdom? Your advanced age?”

“None,” he frowned darkly. “None at all.” They sat for a moment, in a silence that ought to be awkward, or frightening, but wasn’t either. 

“Is this Debussy?” She asked. “One of the obscure ones.”

She could see that this question pleased him immensely. “Claire de Lune,” he said, “is only the beginning.” She noticed, too, that he was too still. He did not scratch his head or readjust his body in the car seat, or idly trace a seam of the leather. He sat still and looked out the front window. He had very controlled breathing. He took a careful, audible breath. “Why are you ditching biology?” 

She shook her head. “If I answer a question, you answer one.”

“I’m not making deals with you, Bella.”

“Why not?”

He shook his head, smiling despite himself. “You’re too powerful.”

“All the better. Align yourself with powerful people.” She felt shy of him, didn’t know what to say to him, but also felt that she couldn’t admit her shyness. “So it’s a deal. I’m skipping biology because they’re doing blood typing today, and blood makes me queasy. You?”

“If you ask me the same question,” he said, withering, “That would be a serious misuse of the bargain.”

“That wasn’t the question. I assume you have your own healthy reason for ditching, whatever it is.”

“I do.”

“Good.”

They sat quietly while she thought about her question. It was in her self interest, if she wanted new information, to ask a question that he would be able or willing to answer honestly. Questions about _power _were pointless. She felt the word problem of choosing the right question was a kind of audition, one she didn’t resent. Finally she asked, “When you stopped that van, did it hurt you?”

She could see that it was well chosen—not because of what it could elicit but because he was surprised. He was reshuffling something in his mind. “Would it change something for you if it did?” He asked finally. Something in his voice was ragged, both concerned and tired.

“I guess it could affect how guilty I feel. But I just want to know.”

“It didn’t hurt me.”

“Okay,” she said, serene, although this should have been a big disclosure. “I didn’t think so.” 

“Did it hurt you? What did my father say, anyway?” 

“Just a bump on the head, really. Because of you. And Alice.” 

Edward grimaced slightly. “I hope you’re not upset with Alice. She really did try to do everything right.”

Bella nodded. “Alice can’t see everything before it happens,” she said. “But she does okay.”

“Did she tell you that?” He looked startled, stretched thin. When she’d first met him she would never have thought it would be so easy to get a reaction out of him, outside of (still unexplained) revulsion. Bella was not a provocative person, but then again she had never thought of herself as powerful either. The best kind of power, and something very hard to organically manufacture, is the power of people listening to you when you speak. Edward and Alice were both good at giving her this. Because Bella was a 17 year old girl, it was fundamentally strange to find herself listened to. It made her sit up straight. 

“No,” she answered his question. “I’m just gathering, based on knowing her a little bit.”

He looked like he wanted to ask her another question. She wondered if the question was_, Are you gay? _She knew how she’d answer: _I happen to be wondering myself. _She sort of always thought she might be, and yet had failed to seriously entertain the idea and its implications. 

“Bella,” he said finally, with difficulty. “I don’t think you should be friends with me.”

Bizarrely, this stung. She hadn’t precisely realized she wanted to be his friend. “Are you saying that as a piece of advice?” Her voice was weaker than she’d wanted. 

He nodded. 

“Are you going to give me a reason?”

He shook his head. 

“It’s rather insulting to have all the answers held back,” she said, both angry and embarrassed. “Do you get a lot of mileage out of being mysterious?”

Edward mumbled something half-inaudibly, which sounded like, _Do you? _He set his jaw and breathed very slowly. “No. Do I at least get points if I’m being mysterious but telling the truth?”

“No,” she said immediately. “That’s way worse.”

“I’ll be mysterious about Bigfoot, then.”

“Bigfoot would be the most likely explanation at this point,” she retorted. She felt very small. 

He closed his eyes. “Let it be Bigfoot, then,” he whispered. “Work on that assumption for a while.”

Bella thought it was possible that this profound and elegantly shaped boy did not know what he was talking about. What evidence did she have that he was important, or philosophical, or wise? Only that he had saved her life. He seemed to regret it. The storm of unhappiness between them was offset by the flowery, floating Debussy still emanating from his car’s excellent sound system. Finally she said, “What about Alice?”

He sounded aggrieved. “I’m not in charge of Alice.”

“You’re not in charge of me, either.”

He opened his eyes suddenly, strange, fake-looking topaz eyes. How was it that something you knew to be fake still had impact? “No,” he said. “I’m not.”

“Maybe that’s why you don’t want to be friends.”

“That’s not what I said.”

Bella sucked her bottom lip into her mouth. She was exhausted by his word games; she no longer felt powerful. “Okay,” she said, “got it,” though she quite obviously didn’t. “Good meeting.”

“Bella—” he said, but didn’t move to prevent her from leaving the car. She found her own truck in the parking lot and put in a Muse CD because this struck her as the sort of thing he would disdain. His opinion was irrelevant, anyway. She felt safe and lonely in the big cab of the truck, engine humming so the heat could run. 

If she played the one question game with Alice, what would she ask? _Do you like girls? _Or _What kind of Bigfoot are you? _They seemed, somehow, like related questions. 


	11. Chapter Eleven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was Edward’s car and he was driving it, his face distorted, frightening, with rage. Alice almost flew out of the passenger seat. She called, “Bella!” And then came all the way over to her anyway. She looked almost luminescent with power. A fashion week angel with the authority to govern. “Bella,” she said, her voice small and bulletproof. “Get in the car.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know who (and which adapted scenes) you'd like to see more of in the comments! Thanks for reading!

On Monday the Cullens took two cars to school, as they often did. Edward and Alice pulled up next to Rosalie’s car, but the other three had been ten minutes ahead of them. Alice ran into Emmett on her way to class; Emmett made eye contact, smirked, and murmured, “Better watch out. Bella Swan’s been to La Push.” 

She didn’t have time to ask what he meant, though she had a suspicion; he was passing her and going into his first class. All morning she wondered how Bella’s journalistic edge had been sharpened there, this place she couldn’t go. 

~~~

In high school no one precisely _chose _their friends. They were inherited, from early years of school, especially in a small town. Or you shifted friend groups through an environmental shift that happened mysteriously and outside of your control. Or you arrived late, and had them assigned to you. Bella knew this from books and movies as well as from her own experience. The friends she’d had assigned she—_liked _would have been too strong a word. They were alright. That was what she told Charlie anyway. But when Jessica and Angela invited her to a shopping trip to Port Angeles to shop for dresses, she agreed at once. First, for Charlie’s sake, she was trying. Second, she wanted to leave Forks, and going back north to Port Angeles, back up the highway toward Seattle if not all the way there, seemed auspicious. Third, she’d hung out with that boy Jacob Black during the La Push trip, and he had told her some startling things about the Cullens. Internet research seemed too flimsy, not serious enough for the intensity of the allegations. And anyway the dial-up in her room was too slow. She needed _books_, a truth universal to all the major and minor crises of her life thus far. 

And this was a crisis. All the way up in the car, Jessica nattering on endlessly and Angela, traitorously, egging her on, Bella thought about her half-formed question: _What kind of Bigfoot are you? _Alice Cullen? Edward Cullen, too. By what historical mythical trope did you save my life? By what graphic novel _bang _did you upend it? She did not know if she was doing a school research project or taking a short and permanent trip to a different world. Possibly, if you believed in the means and ends of your research, they were the same thing. 

In Port Angeles she left the dress shop as soon as she could. Being there with the other girls, talking about cleavage and spaghetti straps, had made her feel _gendery_. She trekked up to the bookstore, which was on a hill in a city that had no hills. Miraculously she found the book she’d been looking for. She paid for it at the counter, which had on it a basket full of pins that said _We’re still here _and _books not bazookas _and _Sasquatch watch _and _no justice no peace_. For the first time she felt a twinge of identification, that she might be the sort of person who wore buttons they sold in bookstores like this. The cashier was an older woman with a long gray braid who read the book’s title and said, ambiguously serious, “You never can be too careful.” Bella never wanted to leave. 

When she did, the thing that she had been told Happens to Girls happened to her, or started to. It had been presented as an inevitability and the confirmation of this fact was what was most horrifying about it. That and the fact that, just like a dream, she couldn’t scream. She was still, nevertheless, preparing to crunch an instep under her shoe when the Volvo came screeching up. 

It was Edward’s car and he was driving it, his face distorted, frightening, with rage. Alice almost flew out of the passenger seat. She called, “_Bella!_” And then came all the way over to her anyway. Alice was wearing tight jeans and her same rain jacket open over a brilliantly green sweater. Her hair was styled into its stylish spiky slouch as it had been at school. She looked almost luminescent with power —a  fashion week angel with the authority to govern. “Bella,” she said, her voice small and bulletproof. “Get in the car.” 

Bella began to do so, frightened of everybody. “You have to come with me,” she said after a moment.

It was as if this expectation had not occurred to Alice. There was a violence in her eyes that was sickening to witness. “Get in the—” she began again, but she was losing grasp of sentences. 

Bella put her hand on Alice’s shoulder, which was hard as stone. “Please,” she said. “Come on.” She turned her body toward the car, and miraculously Alice began to follow her. Edward, behind the wheel, had not moved. “Hurry,” he said, when she opened the door, so she got into the passenger seat, which smelled of Alice, lavender and lemongrass and something else. Alice, seeing nothing, climbed into the back. 

“Where am I going?” Edward said between his teeth. He was not in charge. 

“Away,” Alice snapped, and he spun the car around so hard that Bella’s stomach lurched. 

Soon they were on the freeway, speeding back toward Forks with alarming speed. After a few minutes Edward growled at his sister, who had not spoken or moved, “Control yourself!” 

Alice didn’t immediately reply, but after a moment she said, her voice small and wondering, “I am not a violent person.” She said it to suggest that the exact opposite had become true. 

Bella twisted in her seat to look at her. It was dark in the car on the road but Alice seemed to glow, just a little. Her eyes were the exact color of the sycamore leaves that remained on the trees in Phoenix, crunchy and cooked, until January. Bella was afraid. “I know,” she said. 

Alice’s eyes snapped to her and focused. She took a deep breath. “Keep talking, please,” she said, so Bella did. She talked about the sycamores that grew in Arizona and the cedars that lined her backyard in Forks and _Wuthering Heights _and anything else she could think of, all while holding tightly to her bag with the research book hidden inside it. Edward was still driving very fast. Finally Alice let out a long breath. “What about your friends?” She asked Bella.

Bella had understood the crisis to be at a level far exceeding that in which Jessica and Angela could be considered. “Er—they’re probably wondering where I am. But it’s—.”

“We should go back. As long as—.” She looked keenly into Bella’s face. “Are you alright? What do _you _want to do?” 

Bella wanted to go on being with her. She wanted Edward gone, she wanted to ask a hundred questions, she wanted to ask no questions and say nothing. She wanted to touch her shoulder again. Probably going back to Port Angeles was the best way to manufacture this. “We should go back, probably, I don’t want to worry my friends. I’m okay, really, it’s not a big deal.”

Alice, suddenly angry again, pulled back her lips to reveal very white teeth. She was frightening to see. “It _is _a big deal,” she snarled. “Not only that they would hurt _you_, which is bad enough for a hundred lifetimes. But the way it’s always happening. The habitual nature of it, the—ordinariness of it. Men.” 

“Were those men ordinary?” Bella wondered. 

Edward made a choked sound in his throat.

Alice shook her head. “We have to talk about something else.” 

Bella let her mind refocus on logistics, on plan-making and organizing, a natural skill of hers that took her away from fear and curiosity. “We should go back. Find Jessica and Angela, they have my jacket anyway.” 

“Alice—” Edward said, a warning tone. 

“Edward,” she said in an identical tone, putting him off. “Bella’s right. But you don’t have to go with us. You go home, tell Carlisle and Esme we’re okay.”

“He doesn’t have to go,” Bella protested weakly. She’d always been bad at protecting her own special interests. She was thinking of him saying, _We shouldn’t be friends_. Of his seeming regret the first time she’d saved his life. Of him saying, _You’re too powerful. _She got the sense that he still believed it, despite everything that had happened. She still wanted him out of the car. She was formulating her first question. 

“He’s taken enough risks as it is,” Alice said, her voice sharp, more to him than to her. 

“How will he get home?” Bella did not know the answer to this question but she knew its edges. 

“Don’t worry about that.”

Edward pulled suddenly into a turnoff and got out of the car. “Bella,” he said, addressing her for the first time. “Keep her on track. Please.” Then he jogged into the woods. Almost immediately Alice was at the driver’s side door, getting in. Her face was entirely different than it had been when they’d first driven away from the alley, but it was still stark and serious. 

“Alice?” She began. 

“I know. I’ve lost the right to stall. Probably I never had it.” With prim and precise expertise she turned the car around and drove back toward Port Angeles. After a moment her eyes lit up and she said, “You need to eat something.”

“Really I don’t feel that hungry.” 

“That’s the shock. You’ll have to eat something.” 

“Where did Edward go?”  
“We weren’t that far from our house, really. He can get back home that way.”

Bella didn’t answer to signify that she did not accept this answer. What did it feel to be halfway to knowing something? And to be aware of it even still? It was possible it was something like having a dream about kissing a girl. A dream that almost entirely evaporated once you woke up, but not quite. 

“I know you have a lot of questions for me,” Alice began again. She drove nearly as fast as Edward, with her tiny hands at ten and two. “And that’s fair. But I was wondering, if you’re generous, if I could ask you one first. Before all of yours.”

“Go ahead,” Bella said tonelessly. What could Alice want from her? What about her was not utterly transparent? 

“What did you go to Port Angeles to buy?”

Bella clutched at her bag instinctively. Too transparent, indeed. “I can’t tell,” she said, refusing to lie. 

“If you tell, it might give away your questions,” Alice surmised. 

“Yes.” 

They were somehow already in the town again, the streetlights dim and hazy in the fog. Bella was afraid to look down the streets for fear of seeing those men. Alice found Angela and Jessica immediately, a skill Bella didn’t ask about. 

“Alice and I ran into each other,” she said lamely. It felt more like a confession than a lie. 

“We’re sorry we didn’t wait to eat,” Angela said, seeming to mean it. “We couldn’t find you, we figured you were reading at the bookstore.”

“It’s okay.”

“You girls can go home,” Alice cut in, “Bella needs to eat something.”

Her authority, in contradistinction to her stature, was so pronounced that the other girls, bewildered, agreed. 

“I told you I’m not that hungry,” Bella said. It gave her a strange pleasure to push against Alice’s will and to know that Alice would push back. 

Alice tucked a tiny strand of dark hair back behind her ear. There were three thin-chained dangling bracelets on her wrist. She said, “I want you to be hungry.” 

Bella, who had been prepared to crush the instep of a drunk man in an alley, considered that it was also bravery to say what you wanted, even or especially when it made no sense. Because Alice wanted her to be hungry she ordered ravioli. Alice refused to eat. 

When Bella had finished half her meal and Alice was reassured that she wasn’t going into shock, she said, “Alright, then. You might as well go ahead. I’m curious to hear where you want to start.” 

This was a repeat of her game with Edward, one question each, and this instance, like that one, felt like a test. With Edward she had chosen, _Did stopping that car hurt you_? She didn’t need to ask in this version of the game. She knew that saving her from the alley had hurt Alice, just as the book in her bag would. She also knew already what her question would be, chosen not because it was strategic or poetic but because she couldn’t bear not knowing. 

“When we were in the car, Edward told you to _control yourself_. In the middle of dead silence. What did that mean?” 

Alice grimaced, a bizarrely pretty expression on her delicate face. “How do you do it?” She asked. “How do you cut all the way to the heart of things?”

“What?”

She muttered, more honest than before, “I wish your first question hadn’t been about Edward.” 

“It’s about _you_,” Bella said, too loud. “What were you trying to control?”

Alice drew a little square on the checkered plastic tablecloth with one finger. “My anger,” she said slowly, “At those men, for trying to hurt you.”

“And Edward just intuited that.”

She tilted her head. “More or less, yes. But I can see that I haven’t satisfied you.”

“How did you know where to find me? How did you know I was in trouble?”

Alice smoothed both hands over the top of her head, flattening her hair, but when she pulled her hands away, it sprung back into place, unruffled except in the cool tousled way it was ruffled by design. “Bella,” she said, “What book do you have in your bag?” 

With trembling fingers Bella removed _Vampires: An Abbreviated History and Reference Guide _from her backpack.

Alice turned it over in her hands, opened the dust cover to read the synopsis. She was unbearably pretty, in the twinkling lights of the restaurant, the elegant curves of her features exaggerated, her lashes low, her throat flashing white and smooth between the collared edges of her rain jacket. Finally she looked up. “Well,” she said, “Abbreviated no more, eh?” 


	12. Chapter Twelve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice was having a thought she perceived as unique to her supernatural predicament but was perhaps universal to young girls on drives with young girls they find overwhelmingly pretty: Why doesn’t this person think I’m dangerous?

Really Alice had not dropped Edward off anywhere close to the house, but he knew he was a lower order concern. He had a long run back, which helped to a certain degree in alleviating his anxiety. When he came into the house at last, he found Jasper and Rosalie sitting together in the unused kitchen. Their heads were close together, dark blond, and their features, Edward thought, were similarly elegant. For a moment it seemed almost plausible, this lie they carted around all day—that they were twins.

When he came in he heard Rosalie think, _Finally_, and felt Jasper close his thoughts off, cloak them with his ambiguous feeling trick. He had been avoiding Edward—gently, not rudely—and Edward knew that he had the ability to end this, whenever he felt ready. But he didn’t know what to do with his agency. He felt he’d been saddled with it. 

The Hales looked up and Rosalie minutely pushed over a barstool for him. Instead, he leapt up and sat on the granite countertop facing them. She rolled her eyes. 

Jasper, despite a commitment to personal reserve, spoke first. “Is Bella okay?” 

He nodded. “We got there just in time.”

“What was happening up there? Alice didn’t tell me what she saw,” Rosalie said. 

Edward’s eyes came up to meet hers. “You don’t want to know,” he said, his voice stony. 

Rosalie turned and looked pointedly out the window, which to her superior vision would reveal the rows and rows of pines that clustered outside the house. Edward could tell, either by ambient mind-reading or by general instinct, that Jasper was resisting the urge to touch her shoulder. 

Edward said softly, “They didn’t touch her.” 

She said without stirring, “There’s no such thing as _good enough _in these cases, is there?” But there was no heat in her voice. “I find it difficult to hand out prizes for rescuers.” 

“Rose,” Jasper said, very low, both comfort and lecture. It was the first time Edward could remember Jasper trying to defend him.

He didn’t want to fight with Rosalie. He wanted to know that Alice and Bella were getting along alright. He wanted to run to Alaska and keep running. He wanted to eradicate the look of vacancy on Jasper’s face. He wanted to drink Bella’s blood. He wanted to approximate _sleep. _He wanted to touch—. 

Edward jumped off the counter and went over to the sliding glass doors that led outside. _No thinking_. No thinking, only waiting for rain to come. He said, “I don’t want a prize. I’m with you.”

“I know.”

Jasper said, cautious, “They stayed behind? In—.”

“In Port Angeles. Alice was angling to take her to dinner.” 

Rosalie made a darkly amused sound in her throat. Edward didn’t have to deeply probe her mind to know what she was thinking, nor to understand that it was complicated, and not entirely transparent. “It could be a good thing,” cooed Jasper in a way that abruptly irritated Edward. This wasn’t about Rosalie. He couldn’t soothe everyone. Edward and Rosalie had little in common but one thing was their shared refusal to be soothed. 

“Alice’ll do what she thinks is best,” he told them both. “It was pretty clear that Bella wanted to stay with her.” 

“So it’s happening, then,” Rosalie asked. “They’re—dating? What is the term?” Jasper and Edward both eyed her, flustered and confused. “Oh, don’t pretend like you don’t know,” she said vaguely, a generalized and unpointed accusation, and tossed her hair. 

Jasper’s accent emerged as he prepared to make a declaration. “I think,” he said, “Alice likes her very much.” There was something in the length and softness of his vowels that made Edward’s insides feel pressed and compacted. “I think it’s sweet. It’s young love, you know. They actually are young.” 

“_I’m _young,” Rosalie contended with manicured irony. Then she flashed a little smile. “I’m happy Alice is learning about herself. But a human girl—.”

“We’ve been through all this a month ago,” Edward said quickly. “We know what you think about this.”

Rosalie pointed a finger. “You’re a far greater threat to that girl than the lesbian.”

“Rose!” Jasper said, but he sounded a little amused. 

“Exactly,” Edward said, “so leave her alone about it. I’ll be making all the reprehensible reckless endangerment choices in this family.”

“Oh, don’t underestimate your siblings,” Jasper said, smiling a little. He pushed a shock of hair back from his face. “Don’t _hog _the recklessness.”

“Do you think that’s a threat?” Edward asked Rosalie. 

“Do you think Bella Swan will survive the school year?” She said in a mockingly similar cadence. 

“Where’s Emmett?” Edward changed the subject. Jasper was speaking in code and the temptation was to speak it right along with him. It was a language he had not had to learn. 

“Trying to reclaim some of the recklessness, probably,” Rosalie said with both exasperation and fondness. “Building something.”

“I expect I’d better check up on him,” Jasper said, and rose. Edward fought the sudden urge to go with him. 

“I’m not going to make Alice uncomfortable about this,” Rosalie told him when they were alone. “But can I give you a piece of advice? Don’t _help_.”

“Oh I don’t think I’m much help to anybody.”

She groaned and quite literally ran from the room. 

~~~

What is a first date, after all, but an interview? This dinner was both. Bella said, “We don’t have to talk about this,” which was an absurd, nearly comical, deferral. Her cheeks were pink and her neck, exposed over the open collar of a flannel shirt, was blotchy. 

“Certainly we do,” Alice said. The moment she had seen the book she felt a palatial calm, tinged with being impressed. Bella—whatever sort of help she’d had from her friends at La Push—had figured it out. “Apparently you’re going to give me a book report.”

“_Alice_—” Bella said shortly, a little embarrassed but also annoyed. It pleased Alice more than it should. 

“I have no sarcasm in my heart for the book,” Alice said, raising her hands in innocence. “At least not yet. I don’t know anything about the book.”

“I couldn’t find—anything online. It was just preliminary research.”

“Well I’m here now. You can continue it.”

Bella surveyed Alice with skepticism and wariness, and seemed to find her wanting. “You said,” she began slowly, “that you’d ‘lost the right to stall.’”

“Yes.”

“What did you mean?”

Alice leaned forward and frowned. “You’re shivering,” she said. “Probably the shock.”

“It’s the Coke.” She had, in fact, drunk a great deal of soda. Alice felt she had quickly lost the ability to know whether this was odd.

“I’m not convinced.”

“Alice.” 

“I can’t imagine how you must be feeling, only now sinking in the situation, it would make sense to be shivering.”

“Seriously, I’m okay, I just drank too much soda.”

Alice got up and slipped out of her rain jacket, which was regrettably unlined and not very warm. She personally did not wear it for warmth. “Put it on, please.” She was offering Bella a costume. She felt a little exposed sitting down again in her thin sweater, her bracelets sliding down her wrist.

Bella looked odd, smaller, in Alice’s jacket. It was not a vampire costume but one to facsimile girliness. Her arms were too long for the sleeves. “You’d lost the right to stall,” she prompted. 

“Well, haven’t I? I have always owed you the truth.”

“Why?”

Alice pointed at Bella, as if naming the murderer in a parlor reveal. “Don’t _do _that.”

Bella didn’t ask what. She eyed Alice and then opened the book, read the inside book cover, and began to flip the pages. “Book report,” she said, both quiet and powerful, far too keen. Alice thought, _there’s the girl. _She thought, _I recognize you_. 

Bella studied the page for a moment and then said, “Vampires often said to not be able to go out in the sunlight.” She glanced up. “Obvious place to start.”

“Myth.”

“But you don’t come to school when the sun’s out.”

Alice winked. She felt drunk. “Show you sometime.” 

Bella accepted this with a gesture, and kept reading. “Garlic,” she said. 

“Myth.”

“Sleep in coffins.” 

“Actually, I don’t sleep at all.” 

Bella looked up sharply. “Really?”

“Can’t. Don’t need to.”

Alice could feel her face being studied. _Revlon can do nothing about this_, she thought about saying, drawing an oval over her ghostly and dark-circled face with one finger, but it felt too sad to make a good joke. Instead she said, “I haven’t slept in a year.”

“That sounds very lonely.”

Alice bristled a little, defied in her effort to keep thinks as light as possible. “That’s not the lonely part.” 

Bella asked questions about vampire history and mythology, which Alice knew nothing about and didn’t care to learn. Bella paid for her food and they returned to the car. Alice reflected that she could drive slowly, to extend their time together, but this seemed to threaten the very substance of her new identity as a Cullen, a family of road warriors. 

To be in the car with Bella was dangerous and lovely. Alice’s throat was all fire. She thought she knew why Shakespeare called an orgasm a little death. Two sides of a coin. “You didn’t ask me the most salient question. You have absolutely no sense of self preservation, you know.”

“I know,” Bella said, so agreeable that it was disarming. She was an unpredictable and maddening person. “The most salient question is—.” She didn’t go on. 

“You have no fear of death?”

“Not from you.” She answered too quickly. 

“What does the book say?”

“Clearly the book hasn’t gotten much right so far.” She turned to look at Alice, whose superior peripheral and night vision were far too perceptive. Bella was so pretty and so _solid_—not physically but in her energy, her personal atmosphere—that Alice herself was the satellite. It was possible, she was discovering for the first time, to be struck by the intensity of someone’s beauty over and over again, with new power each time, so often that it took time out of the day. She was having a thought she perceived as unique to her ontological-supernatural situation but was perhaps universal to young girls on drives with young girls they find overwhelmingly pretty. _Why doesn’t this person think I’m dangerous? _

Alice answered, finally, “Fear might behoove you, a little bit. But I’m glad it’s not keeping you from being here.”

“It wouldn’t.” Something was crystallizing for Bella—there was something unsettling about her nascent certainty. For the thousandth time Alice clawed at the edges of her futures and found only images, both soothing and the reverse. 

“We only eat animals. My family, I mean. We don’t kill people.”

“You didn’t seem like the type,” Bella said, but her voice was a little thin. She let out a breath. “Thank you for telling me.” Then she was quiet a long time, Alice assumed because she was assembling puzzle pieces. Edward’s bare hands on the side of the van; their absence from school; Edward’s revulsion in biology; Alice’s evasions; Edward Edward Edward. Ugh. She envied Edward his power to galvanize people, to produce reactions wherever he went. She herself felt too slight—a curiosity, or a side character. She told herself to stop thinking, to invest in the task before her, driving in the dark with this very particular girl next to her. 

They drove in silence for a long time. When they approached the Forks exit, Bella said, “Drive a little longer—please?”

“Where?”

“Just here. South, I mean.”

So Alice kept driving south. When they began to talk again, they talked about music, and weather, and coffee or the memory of coffee. Alice wanted to drive to Oregon at least. Finally, deep in the Hoh Rainforest, she forced herself to turn around. 

“One more question for now,” Bella said, “and then I’ll stop persecuting you.”

“It isn’t persecution, but go on.”

Alice was waiting to be asked to come out in a second way, and she felt that two was too many for one day. If she had to _explain _one more thing about herself and her makeup, her primeval drives, she might scream and scream; she might _run_ to Oregon. This one, at least, she could turn back on Bella. Where has _your _brain chemistry gone awry? (a-right, Emmett would have amended, always an ally, clumsy and militant). How about you, Bella Swan? Takes one to know one, right? 

Bella queued up her question: “You told me once, if you recall, that I had no future. Did you mean it literally?”

The lesson was still there for both of them to learn: just how literal, how devoid of real metaphors, their world was. 


	13. Chapter Thirteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “How long have you been seventeen?”
> 
> Alice bit her lower lip to keep from grinning. “Just over thirteen months,” she said, “but what’s it to you? How long have you been seventeen?”
> 
> Bella counted. It had been eight months.
> 
> “Well that’s not so long,” Alice said reasonably. “I imagine you’ll finish with it first."

Before Edward returned from his rescue mission with Alice, Rosalie and Jasper sat at the kitchen counter, waiting for them to get back. It was not especially comforting to have the two most extrasensory members of the family gone at the same time; they were flying blind. Rosalie claimed to not care very much what happened to Bella Swan. Jasper, with his somewhat more limited extrasensory skills, knew this to be a lie. 

For Rosalie’s part, she was hard to fool. “You’re not convincing anyone,” she said to him vaguely as she painted her nails. 

Jasper blinked, innocent. “I didn’t say anything.”

She gestured in the air, as if to dissipate his empathetic aura. “I can feel through it,” she said. “And it’s fake. You’re scared.”

“Never said I wasn’t,” he said, but he was cowed. Jasper had known that to live in this family, with Edward and Alice specifically, would be to give up privacy. He hadn’t expected that the greatest brain space colonizer was Rosalie, who used observation and subtlety to intuit (two traits the supernaturally blessed siblings more or less completely lacked). 

“You know, we don’t even know Alice’s vision was accurate. She can’t see the girl very well at all, it might be a mistake.”

“I thought of that,” Jasper said. He wished he had something to do with his hands—whittling, maybe. But that was only a straight-across gender analog to Rosalie’s task. Maybe he simply wanted to paint his nails too. It seemed meditative. 

“And?”

“And?” He hedged. 

She groaned. “I’m not Esme, you know. I won’t sit here and tirelessly pull things out of you. You don’t want to talk, don’t talk.” 

Rosalie and Jasper had had many conversations that were half argument, half heart to heart, so he knew this to be all bluster. What she in reality meant was not _keep your privacy, then_, but rather_, out with it, you try my patience. _

He said, “Even if Alice’s vision is accurate, I think they can get to her. It’s not really that.” 

“It’s more that Alice has no sense of secrecy, and Bella is going to figure everything out,” she finished for him. 

He tilted his head. “That’s Alice’s affair, she can manage it,” he said. “I’m worried about—.” He stopped short. It was unbearably declarative to just drop a pronoun and end a sentence. He wasn’t ready. 

“_Him_,” Rosalie finished. 

“He’s very—shaken up—by her,” Jasper said, hating the intensity in his own voice.

She looked, exasperated and certain, at him. “Not like that,” she said. 

“I know,” he said, though he didn’t. “But her blood—well, it’s difficult. He wants to do the right thing.”

Rosalie rolled her eyes with decades worth of expertise. “I know you don’t believe what Emmett says about blood singers, but either way—.”

“Do you?”

“Jazz,” she said, both gentle and impatient. “I’m not a philosophical person. We all believe what’s more convenient for us to believe.”

“That sounds like philosophy to me.”

“Well, it isn’t.”

They sat in tetchy silence for a minute. “I know you care a lot about dignity,” he said finally. “And I’m perfectly aware that behaving this way—being this sort of transparent—isn’t dignified.” 

“Behaving what way?”

“Oh, come on,” he said, his accent surfacing, as it always did, when he was sheepish or frustrated. “Nothing dignified about unrequited love.” 

She frowned. “I can’t tell you what to do, Jasper. But I don’t think that’s true.” 

He wasn’t sure how the truth of the premise related to what he was supposed to _do _about it, but he didn’t have a chance to ask, because Edward was coming in, his shoulders and hair dark with rain. Instantly Jasper _turned over _his mind with the help of an amorphous emotional energy that cloaked his thoughts. Or at least, that was the theory. 

Edward’s expression was complicated. He didn’t speak, only pulled off his thin jacket and hung it on a hook in the kitchen, revealing a white T-shirt rendered slightly more transparent and clinging by the rain it had endured, suggesting the shape of his chest. Jasper looked away. It wasn’t dignified to want a man eighty years his junior, even if the man in question was eighty years old himself. It wasn’t dignified to come onto someone who was unable or willing to entertain the idea of wanting men. Not dignified, and furthermore, intensely shameful, to have contributed to a heinous war and centuries of racist violence, and then to apologize, change course, and expect to get to move on. Not dignified to over-invest in human lives in a way that could only bring hurt. Not dignified to let 160 years of reserve, of self containment and self preservation go to waste for this boy, this coven, this tiny teenaged psychic, deep in the woods on the Olympic Peninsula, where no Whitlock had ever been before. He had done with dignity and yet he couldn’t bring himself to truly let it go. 

Jasper trained his attention on the girl in crisis. “Is Bella okay?” 

~~~

When Bella came outside to go to school in the morning, the Cullens’ Volvo was parked beside her truck. Alice was sitting cross-legged on the roof of the car, eyes closed, in a meditative faux-yoga pose. She seemed to be sitting on her raincoat, so as to not dirty her rather historically cut loose tweedy trousers. When Bella came to stand in front of the car, looking up, Alice peeked one eye open, experimentally, and then both. “Oh,” she said, “hi.”

“Namaste,” Bella said politely. 

“I thought maybe you’d like to ride to school with me today.” 

It was not precisely the offer of a ride, or even Alice’s presence, that made Bella blush. It was thinking of Alice early this morning, divvying up the car rides, logistically organizing her siblings so that she could have the Volvo to bring it here. So they could ride to school just the two of them. “Maybe I would,” she said. 

“Can you bear to be parted from your precious truck?” Alice said. She was down on the ground beside Bella, suddenly. It was if she had teleported. _Oh. _Alice was a vampire. 

“Can you be subtle for once in your life?” Bella asked. She was too happy to be scared.

Alice frowned, and then made a performed, realer-than-real frown. “No,” she said. “Get in, we’ll be late.”

In the car together was once again the scent of Alice’s perfume, unnamable and _convincing_, compelling to whatever proposed action. Bella wished that once again she could tell Alice to keep driving, past the mundanities of school and into continuing conversation. “Today—” They began simultaneously, and then both trailed off.

“You first,” Alice said. 

“Today,” she began again, “Let’s talk about the past.”

Alice huffed a little laugh. “You’re an incorrigible girl, you know,” she said. A spike of heat, either embarrassed or something else, went through Bella’s whole body. “I told you, the past isn’t my specialty.”

“We talked about your specialties last night.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Alice mumbled. 

Bella continued without acknowledging that, “I don’t know if the past is my specialty but it—”

“Would get me on my back foot?” Alice’s expression was puckish.

“Well.” Bella twisted her backpack strap with one hand. 

“You love talking about Phoenix,” Alice accused, suppressing a smile. 

“Do I? Oh, last night. I was distracting you. I didn’t mean I was going to monologue about my past, I mostly wanted to hear about yours. And when you say—‘today’—what were you going to say?”

“I was going to say, ‘It’s my turn to ask the questions.’”

Bella laughed; she couldn’t help it. “So you wanted to hear about Phoenix.”

“Well—”

“Or no, maybe you wanted to ask questions about my future. Since you can’t see it. Neither can I, Alice.”

“_Now _you’re persecuting me,” Alice said, letting the smile overwhelm her face. She pulled neatly into a compact parking space in the school lot. Before getting out, she said, “We can talk about the past. Oh, one thing—.” She grew serious again, suddenly, like a cloud covering the sun. “Stay away from my brothers, okay?”

Bella didn’t have time to ask what she meant, because Alice was sliding out of the car, at a laboriously human pace. Bella rushed to keep up. The parking lot was full of kids getting ready for school, and once they saw her getting out of the Cullen Volvo, walking beside Alice toward the main building, eyes were wide and fingers were pointed. Bella waited to feel embarrassed but felt instead only proud, to be seen with the fashion queen, the mystery Cullen girl. Still she kept thinking about Alice’s warning, especially when considered in tandem with Edward saying, _I don’t think we should be friends_. Edward furious behind the wheel of the car, Alice’s resentment of her mentioning him. 

Alice walked her all the way to the door of her class. “Two things,” she said, looking as if something was funny. “Jessica is going to ask you what’s going on with me in Trig. So, you know, be prepared for that.”

Bella’s stomach dropped. “What should I tell her?”

Alice shrugged. “I don’t know, Bella,” she said, smiling. “You’re so invested in the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the etcetera, so this is a good assignment for you.” She winked, a corny and anachronistic gesture that somehow made Bella’s pulse skyrocket. A wink was a way to create a confidence, a silent little contract between two people. Bella and Alice had exchanged far more radical confidences the night before but a wink gave them a different edge. It increased Alice’s authority, her foresight. 

“What’s the second thing?”

Alice squinted for a second, long lashes low, dainty nose wrinkled. “Pop quiz in Spanish today, better study.” She emphasized the point by tapping Bella rather demurely on the collarbone with one finger, a black-and-glitter-painted short nail against Bella’s oatmeal sweater. Then she turned, only a hair too fast to be human, and glided down the hallway, weaving through bodies, the pink of her raincoat visible for a long time. 

_You’re not getting out of talking about the past_, Bella wanted to yell after her, but she was too shy. 

In Trig, Jessica attempted the third degree. Confusingly, most of her questions were about Edward. “He was just driving Alice, I think,” Bella said, a hopeful guess. She still wasn’t clear on the necessity of Edward’s presence last night, but now she was afraid to ask. 

“But do you think he likes you?” Jessica persisted. 

“_No_,” Bella said, fairly certain in both senses of the word _like_. 

“Did you and Alice have plans to like… hang out?” 

Bella would have liked to anxious turn around and lie down in the ellipsis Jessica had left in the question. “No,” she said, cracking her fingers. 

“But you guys are friends now?”

“Jess,” she said firmly, sliding into her desk and letting her backpack fall to the floor. “You have all the information I have now.”

“That _can’t_ be right,” Jessica said, but she seemed to give up the subject, if Edward was a nonstarter. 

Bella reflected that it had taken her all of 30 seconds to lose her moral high ground, her zeal for the truth. But though she now knew the edges of far more than Jessica did—a whole world, a new dimension of both metaphysics and feelings, a temporal edge into the future—her proclamation _felt _true. She didn’t know anything at all.

After her last class before lunch, Bella found Alice waiting outside the door. She was no longer wearing her raincoat, only the tweedy pants, which gave her a certain sort of professory swagger, and, in contrast, a snug white T-shirt under which the vague texture of a bra was evident. Her hair spiked and slouched away from her face in cool disarray. Her lips were shiny with lip gloss and her irises were a little darker than they’d been the first time Bella had met her, a little less golden. Bella now knew what this meant. She thought of Alice saying, “Fear might behoove you.” Which was not exactly how 17 year olds talked. And yet. Bella felt an unnamable thrill, a combination of thrills that couldn’t be extricated from each other. 

“Why don’t you eat lunch with me today?” Alice said, as if it were a dangerous undertaking. 

“Well, yes.” Bella had thought that it was obvious they would sit together. Was that an unfair assumption? 

Alice looked askance at her but didn’t speak. 

When they were in the cafeteria, Bella could feel Jessica and Mike and Angela staring, but she ignored them. Alice pushed food around her plate. 

“Could you eat food, if you wanted to?”

Alice was amused. “Sure. Couldn’t you eat dirt? Take my word for it. Don’t make me show you.”

This analogy confused Bella but she had other priorities. “Okay, okay. You said we could talk about the past.”

Alice perched her chin on her tiny fist, looking with intensity and, she thought, fondness at Bella. “I did say that, Isabella Swan. Go ahead, then.”

Bella had expected to be interrogated; she had not expected being called by her full name. She took a moment to gather herself. “How old are you?”

Alice made a face as if to say, _maybe this won’t be as bad as I thought_. “Seventeen,” she answered easily.

Bella persisted. “How long have you been seventeen?”

Alice bit her lower lip to keep from grinning. “Just over thirteen months,” she said, “but what’s it to you? How long have you been seventeen?”

Bella counted. It had been eight months. 

“Well that’s not so long,” Alice said reasonably. “I imagine you’ll finish with it first. Tell me about Phoenix.”

Bella told her about Renee and Phil and minor league baseball and the saguaro cacti and the clean open hardness of the Sonoron Desert, and how it softened a little in the winter to let you into it. She told Alice about her room, about the swing chair Phil had installed, where she sat and read every night. Calling customer service to get the cable fixed when her mother gave up on it nearly immediately. Buying aqua frescas and shrimp cocktail, the soupy kind with avocado that came in a big styrofoam cup, from the taqueria down the street. Renewing her junior library card every two years on the day the old one expired. Her gigantic high school, the internal order of endless AP classes. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald writing that small parties don’t have any privacy. Her life in Phoenix had been both private and intimately peopled, a sprawling and familiar world, animated and structured by her mother. 

She left out the part about her grief at leaving it, the awful dimness of Forks until now, but she thought that Alice could tell. “Now,” she prompted. “What about you? What about your past?” 

Alice told her about waking up in Mississippi, traveling with Jasper across the country, finding the Cullens in Alaska. 

“How long ago was that?” Bella conjured up the historical costumes in her mind, preparing herself for deep vampiric time. 

Alice blinked. “A year ago, about.”

“What? What about before that?”

Alice put down her prop-fork on the tray. Her eyes looked dim now, more amber than golden. She twisted a thick, geometric ring around her index finger. “Before that?” She said. “I told you this wasn’t my specialty. Before that, I don’t know.” 


	14. Chapter Fourteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Why don't you just go ahead and say it? Out loud," Bella said. The knees of her jeans were dirty from falling. She was a little bit, not very, afraid of being alone in the woods with him. He thought to himself, reflecting on a century of life, I think this is the most formidable person I have ever known.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for my long absence! Solidarity in quarantine and happy Midnight Sun announcement. I can't wait to absolutely lose my mind on August 4.

Sometimes it was like they were a pastiche of a family. But all the parts had been handed out wrong, like a bag of local musical theater costumes picked out of the bag at random. Carlisle was the enlightened, industrious father, good with wounds and sage advice, but it was Rosalie who tinkered in the garage, and it was Alice, scamming the scammers on Wall Street, who brought in the bulk of the income. Esme would have loved nothing more than to cook, but, as she sometimes said wryly, “Like my far-off ancestors, I turned out more a hunter-gatherer.” Though she had the comforting presence of a TV mom, it was Jasper, of course, who had made his name in soothing. And Edward, by any metric the family member with the most arresting skill, was most often the moody teenaged daughter, plunking away at the piano and refusing to talk. He resented the association even though no one else would have thought to put it that way; it was a little label of his own, used to persecute himself if no one else would do it. When he sat in his room, playing CDs and fretting about Jasper, fretting about Bella, fretting about attempted rapists roaming the streets of Port Angeles, he thought: _go outside _or _go outside yourself _or _go_. None seemed plausible as real options. The only thing worse than being inundated with other people’s thoughts is being alone with your own thoughts.

This was why tonight he was sitting in the living room of the Forks house with his entire family. Carlisle and Esme were hanging a piece of art with a comical amount of unnecessary equipment; Alice was making a piece of macrame so huge that she’d tied the top to the stair railing a floor up and was braiding the rope with long, looping tugs. She’d been tetchy and aloof all day, pressure building like the vampire’s equivalent to a nascent migraine—a nascent vision. Rosalie was doing her makeup on the rug. Jasper and Emmett had moved the dining room table against the wall so they might boyishly wrestle—a competition not so much in strength as in precision, as breaking a furniture or wall meant losing, and worse, Esme’s displeasure. The sight of them circling each other was so stressful to Edward that he tried not to look. He himself was sitting on the piano bench, thinking about playing rather than actually doing it. 

Suddenly Alice dropped the ends of her macrame with a low thud. Edward, getting the vision on a half-second delay like sports radio, sat up straight on the bench. She was only in it for a second, and then said, blinking, “oh _huh_,” which alerted the family that it was not a particularly earth shattering insight. 

“What is it?” Esme asked. 

Alice, still far away, said, “Someone’s coming to visit. I don’t recognize them. Edward did y—” 

He shook his head. 

“They’re friends of yours, Jasper,” she went on. “A man and a woman.”

Jasper, who had been kneeling on the rug bending Emmett’s fingers back, came over at once, instantly an adult again. He didn’t say anything right away, and then, “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Don’t worry just yet,” Carlisle said. “Alice, did you get a name?”

“Ah yes,” she said, a scowl marring her spritely features. “Faces come to you in a vision, announcing their imminent arrival, red eyes glowing, and they always start with name rank and serial number.”

Because they knew that the visions were genuinely taxing, no one scolded her. After a beat Edward said, “Red eyes?” 

“It’s a big surprise to you that my vision is about a vampire? A vampire who drinks _blood_? We need to exercise our imaginations here, I think.”

This time Carlisle did say, “Alice.” 

Jasper, his face serious and focused, was thinking about calming Alice and simultaneously flicking through candidates for old friends who might visit. Edward quickly darted out of his mind; he didn’t want to see. In the long life of a vampire, the phrase “old friend” could mean any number of things.

Alice was concentrating. “Both blond,” she said, “they’re just passing through. Nomads.”

Jasper’s eyes flicked to Edward and away. “Could be Peter and Charlotte,” he said. “I haven’t seen either of them in a long time.” 

“Well you’re about to,” Alice said absently. Then she looked up at Jasper. “They’re not vegetarians.” 

“No,” he agreed slowly. “I don’t expect I know anyone who is one, outside this room. Except the Denalis.” 

Edward made eye contact with Alice. Her thoughts were all Bella. His were too. 

Alice rubbed her forehead. “I can’t remember what a headache feels like,” she said to no one. “And no one around here is going to be able to refresh my memory.” 

“Alice,” Jasper said, low and authoritative. “If it is Peter and Charlotte, they won’t hurt Bella. They’re honorable people.” 

“Honorable _vampires_,” Edward muttered. He’d had his own experience with the frailty of a vampire’s honor. 

“Don’t make this worse,” Jasper told him shortly. Edward found to his dismay that he rather liked the gruff, distracted way Jasper told him what to do. He resolved not to make this worse. 

“If Alice has seen it, it’s happening,” Carlisle said with authority. “We’ll be ready to greet them and ask them not to hunt in the area. That’s all there is to do for now.”

It was difficult to tell whether Jasper or Alice looked the more distressed. 

Later, when they were alone, Alice said to Edward without preamble, “It’s just that she’s _so fragile_. It wouldn’t take a vampire. That truck. That gang of drunken—. A disease, an armed intruder, incompetent teenagers…. It’s so possible. All the time.” 

Edward knew it would more accurate to include him on that list, at the very top. He was learning about his own fragility while Alice learned about Bella’s. “Do you trust Jasper?” He asked her. “On the subject of Peter and Charlotte, if it is them.”

Her expression twisted. He knew she was trying to make herself smile. “Can’t trust vampires,” she said, “even though I usually have.”

“It’s not a good general practice, no,” he said, his face darkening. 

“But then again you think—.” She shifted to look out the wall of windows in his bedroom at the cedar forest beyond it. “Jazz himself, he changed his whole life, he swore off things he’d been doing for a hundred years. He’s certainly trustworthy now. And why did he do it?”

Edward swallowed. “I used to think he did it all for you.”

“For m—for me?” She gave a hollow little laugh. “Jasper Hale? That’s rich.”

“That’s what we all thought. You came together, remember?”

“Edward, I’m _seventeen_.”

“So am I,” he said unhelpfully.

“Fine, you bastard, I’m eighteen. Jasper and me, we’re a century apart. And surely you can tell, I, er, don’t swing that way.” 

“Yes, I know.”

“And anyway, neither does Jasp—well, I mean.” She lapsed into absent silence, picking at a friendship bracelet around her wrist.   
With great trepidation Edward went in search of the second half of the sentence the way you go in pursuit of a suspicious sound in the night. “Well _what_?”

“I was going to say Jasper doesn’t swing that way either, but I don’t think it really works that way for him. He swings whichever way he feels. He swings toward the most brooding eyes.” 

Edward’s still heart seized inside him. “How did we go from planning for Bella’s safety to speculating about _this_?” In addition to everything else, he was wondering again about this couple, Peter and Charlotte, and their association with Jasper. Or were they a couple at all? 

She sighed. “You make me so tired,” she said, bluntly and with great fondness. 

Edward managed to wrest his attention from Jasper long enough to regard his sister, anxious and fierce and certain, dressed in bizarre high fashion corduroy and managing the future of the entire motley family. “You make me tired, too.”

She twisted to sit on the back of his sofa and then let herself fall backwards, hooking onto the top of the sofa by her knees. From that upside down position, only her pant legs and sock-feet visible, she said, “Think of it this way: for a little while, you might not be the most dangerous person in Forks to Bella Swan.” 

~~~

Alice and Bella had lunch together again the next day, and he didn’t talk to her much in biology, but after school, in the parking lot, she forced him to lock eyes. “Come on,” she said in a low voice although he was fifty feet away, and good _grief _that kind of knowledge was unnerving. Then she turned and started to walk to the edge of the parking lot and then into the woods. 

Edward resented being made to follow a girl into the woods. 

He wasn’t a creep.

He wasn’t that confident a vegetarian either. 

But arguing with Bella Swan had gotten him exactly nowhere. 

He followed for a while as the forest got less littered with energy drink cans and soda wrappers and more wreathed in ferns and fog. She tripped a lot, which unnerved him even more, partially on his account and partially on Alice’s. Bella was exceptionally bad at staying unharmed. Or, depending on how you looked at it, very good, despite a lot of near misses. Finally they reached a little clearing in the woods. “Are you still back there?” She said. “You walk _so quiet_.”

“Old habit,” he said. He still tried not to breathe too freely around her. He didn’t know exactly what she knew, or what she wanted from him. He was thinking about Alice desperately scanning the future for a vision of Bella being hurt or unhurt by the visitors. But her future was more or less impenetrable.

“Alice has told me a lot of stuff, you know,” she said, with the wonderfully menacing vagueness of a teenager. 

“I’m sure,” he said thinly. He did not really have the capacity to play bluffing games with this girl today. Unless he could get a consultation, _If someone says someone is an _old friend_, do you take that to mean_—

“You get so much out of mysteriousness. Why don’t you just say it. Out loud.”

_Oh Bella, I’m tired_, he thought. _I’m tired in a body that doesn’t understand the meaning of the word. _His throat was alive with thirst. “Say what? Mind reading?” 

“We haven’t even gotten that far yet.”

“Oh. Vampire? Vampire. Alice told you that.”

The word seemed to have little impact on the girl. “No. I figured it out. I did research.”

“I’m not surprised, Bella, you’re a very resourceful person.”

“Ha, ha, ha.”

“What? I’m not being sarcastic.” 

“Sure.” He realized belatedly that her hands were balled into fists, her shoulders tense. The knees of her jeans were dirty from falling. She was a little bit, not very, afraid of being alone in the woods with him. He thought to himself, reflecting on a century of life, _I think this is the most formidable person I have ever known. _“I’m just trying to put together the pieces, because no one around here tells me anything,” she went on. 

Once he had begun to understand her as formidable, as a kind of diminutive equal, he found himself opening to her in another way. He might be able to use her help after all. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“You said you didn’t think we should be friends. Was that because you’re a vampire?”

He sighed. “No.”

“_No_?”

“I mean, not entirely. It’s complicated.”

“I’m getting ready for AP Calculus, I can take it.”

“I don’t want to scare you.”

She had been looking off into the woods but now she turned to stare at him, hard and sure and unsubtle. It was so bizarre to look at a version of teenhood that was so authentic, so truly childlike, unlike that of himself and his siblings, that he almost wanted to laugh. “I think you’re more scared of stuff than me. I just want to know.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Okay?”

“Ask me another question first. Any other question, we’ll circle back to this, okay?” 

“Can you really read minds?”

He closed his eyes. “Any mind in the world, except for yours.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Huh!” She said eloquently. She wandered off the path and stood, unsteadily, on a rotted old stump, her sneakers slipping on the disintegrating wood. 

“Just be _careful_,” he growled, exasperated and vulnerable. “You do _not _want to go cutting yourself around here.”

Her eyes went far away. “Oh shit,” she said quietly. “That’s why you skipped blood typing.”

“Correct.”

“Open blood makes it harder.”

“_Your _blood makes it harder.” 

She got very still. “Alice didn’t say anything about that.”

It was not good to frighten teenage girls, even when they should, definitely, empirically, logically, be frightened. “Alice is a gentleman,” he muttered. “There’s something for me, about your blood, it’s especially difficult for me to—be decent about it. But it’s—.”

“It’s what?” She asked when he didn’t continue.

He clenched his jaw. “I was going to say it’s something you shouldn’t be worried about, but that’s not true. We should all be worried about it.” 

She thought this over.“That’s why you don’t want to be friends.”

He nodded. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.” 

“I can tell. I trust you.”

He frowned deeply. “You should be more cautious, Bella.”

“You should focus on your own self, Edward,” she said. “Why can’t you read my mind? Is it the same thing that Alice can’t see my future?”

“I don’t know. And yes, probably. You’re resistant to our skills for some reason. Can I ask you one question, please.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why aren’t you more frightened by all this? You should be running for the hills by now.”

She thought about it for a long time, as if weighing what to say. Finally she said, in a small, solid voice, “When you realize that you might be gay, it makes other things—it’s like.” She looked up slowly, and smiled. “Once you’ve had that scary thought, it’s like. Fuck it. Why not vampires?” 

~~~

Late that night, in the kitchen, Jasper said to him, “I hear you and Bella really cleared the air.”

“We braided each other’s hair.”

Jasper smiled. He could ill afford to find anything funny right now, but he did anyway. “I did tell you that you could try being her friend.”

“I know, you’re very wise, you’ve lived a long, long time.” 

Jasper’s face grew abruptly serious. “You know you can ask me anything you want about myself, right?” He was thinking about Peter. Edward darted out of his thoughts. 

Edward had made Bella the same promise earlier that day and so he knew it to be hollow. And anyway, he knew from experience that all the questions you most want answers to can’t be asked in so many words. You have to find out another way. 


	15. Chapter Fifteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How did you know you were gay?
> 
> Has someone ever grabbed your wrist and made you want to follow them into the forest and not come out again?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone, I'm back! Thanks to all the commenters for your kind words and motivating me to return to this story. And happy Midnight Sun! I'm almost done. It's bad, right? It's bad. Please chime in with your hot takes in the comments. 
> 
> Here is a very gay chapter to make up for my absence. Thanks for reading!

The thing about someone asking how you knew you were gay is that then you have to explain to them what attraction is. Metaphors are helpful; so are examples. Start this way: on the bus to the field trip, Jessica got up for a minute and Alice swept into the seat beside Bella. Four inches between their thighs on the cracked vinyl seat, crackling with electricity. An intense, heightened awareness of the other person’s movement. A vampire-like sharpness of perception. The individual threads in Alice’s thrillingly out-of-fashion bleached jeans. Her smell, not a human smell, more like lilacs that had gone to college. The daring she’d had to unseat Jessica. Bella didn’t like to annoy anyone. But it turned out Jessica didn’t mind; she’d slid in next to Mike. “I’d meant to sit with you,” Alice said, just loud enough to be heard over the din of the bus, “But Jessica beat me. I didn’t want to vault the length of the bus.”

“I feel betrayed you didn’t,” Bella said without looking at her. The closeness of Alice’s mouth to her ear. The smoothness and skill of her tiny hands, currently at rest in her lap. Gray nail polish that would not accentuate their unnatural whiteness, rounded perfect fingertips that understood every sensation, slender-strong wrists. All of these awarenesses pounding in Bella’s blood. This probably didn’t help matters.

“You demand too much, Bella Swan,” Alice said with badly faked disinterest. She examined her nails for the impossible presence of an imperfection. “No, you don’t demand enough.”

“What should I be demanding?”

Alice scowled, which could not mar the spritely prettiness of her face. “Leave me alone, Alice, stop telling me such impossible stories, Alice, protect me from the danger you’ve brought into my life, Alice, tell me who’s going to win the Super Bowl so I can make a bet, Alice.”

_Put your perfect fingertips on my kneecap_,_ Alice. Tilt toward me with that kind of casual ownership boyfriends have, Alice_. Bella shifted her weight toward the little legend. “Stop self-flagellating and being so vague about it, Alice.”

Alice smiled, too broadly. “No,” she said happily.

When Bella’s eyes slid closed she didn’t lose an ounce of her hyper-awareness of Alice’s nearness. “Where are we going on this field trip?”

“Are you asking me to consult the flyer or the oracles?” Alice said, very quiet.

Sometimes you could exploit paranormal activity out of sheer laziness. “The flyer. Either.”

Alice made a show of shutting her eyes and sifting through the possibilities. “I am not a trick pony, you know.”

“I know, you’re very dangerous.”

Her eyes flew open. “I _am _dangerous. Don’t be flippant, Bella. I’ve made that mistake.”

Bella wasn’t as cowed as she knew she probably should be. “And what happened?”

“I ended up in Forks Washington on a school bus full of human children.”

“You’re eighteen, calm down.”

Suddenly, Alice’s hand was around Bella’s wrist: her grip was tight and stiff and ice cold. It startled Bella with genuine power. But Alice didn’t say anything chiding to match the gesture. The grip was lecture enough. “Yes,” she said, “I am.”

When she removed her hand, Bella’s wrist burned.

How did you know you were gay?

Has someone ever grabbed your wrist and made you want to follow them into the forest and not come out again?

“You’re stressed today,” Bella said, more gently.

“We’re going to some greenhouse to learn about composting,” Alice said. “I can’t see anymore, probably because _you’ll _be there.”

“Sorry.”

Alice shoved her hand into her hair and roughed it up, over the crown of her head and into big messy peaks. It was not precisely feminine or masculine. There was a delicate shaven place just in front of each ear. Bella swallowed. “Don’t apologize. It’s not _your _fault. Well. Since it works on Edward too, maybe it is.”

“Where is Edward, anyway?”

“I sent him on the other bus. To talk to Jazz.” Alice said this as if Bella would know its significance, but she didn’t.

“Your family seems to require a lot of internal management.”

Alice huffed an unhappy laugh. “You’re right. Eternal life requires a _lot _of admin. And yes, I am stressed. Some of Jasper’s old friends are coming to town.”

Bella waited for her to elaborate, and when she didn’t, prompted, “So?”

“They don’t exactly have Cullen-style ethics. Well. That’s why _I’m _stressed. As we know, you are extremely delectable, and everyone has a difficult time controlling themselves around you. They’ll promise not to hunt in the area, though, and please don’t worry, I wouldn’t let anyone try to hurt you. I shouldn’t have even told you.” She turned to look out the window. “I’m always too honest around you.”

Bella took a minute to digest all this. It made her a little nervous to think about non-vegetarian vampires—Alice had told her that would mean red eyes—in the area. But she also believed, overwhelmingly so, in the talents of the Cullen family, even if she was herself a little impenetrable. What Bella had learned about herself from Alice was two things—well, maybe three. She was tempting, she was powerful. And what else? Embracing her own dangerousness, she slid the palm of her hand over Alice’s thigh, the fabric chilled by the skin underneath. She cupped her hand over Alice’s knee. She could feel her heartbeat in her ears. She knew Alice could feel it too. Neither one of them moved. They were taking all sorts of risks and neither would have known how to rank the list.

~~~

The next day, Jasper and Alice laid on their bellies on the gravel bank of the riverbed next to Peter and Charlotte, the sunlight refracting in crazed spirals off their skin. They were only 100 yards behind the house and the sounds of Edward tinkering at the piano and Rosalie and Emmett squabbling were quite audible. Alice was taking aim at baseball-sized rocks and flicking them into the water with her index finger. She had such a bizarre skill with this that she could sometimes make them skim the top of the water like that. In addition to her most famous ability, she was very good with her hands.

Jasper had laid a layer of calm and sleepiness and ease, the emotional equivalent of the sunshine, over them like a blanket. He was aware of Peter’s eyes on him, surveying how he’d changed; he was equally aware of Edward’s ill mood in the house. “So I just want to reiterate—and I don’t mean this in bad faith,” he started, “that you won’t be hunting in the area.”

Charlotte sat up. “You know we never do.”

“I know. I’m just making a special extra request, this time. For me.”

“You’re very gallant, Jazz.” Alice flipped over and stared up into the blue sky. Sunny days on the Olympic Peninsula were disorientingly beautiful. She had given herself exaggerated cat-eye makeup and heavy brows, and combined with the sparkling of her skin she looked like a goth glamor queen, the tiniest drag queen of the underworld.

“I try,” Jasper said.

“What do you mean?” Peter asked. He did not look like a queen. He was small and sleek and made of light, tender and strong and ruthless. He was a vessel for the past, a past Jasper was scalpeling out of himself like a tumor, but then again, scalpels don’t work very well on vampires.

“Alice.”

Alice huffed, approximating a human blush, but she pushed ahead. “There’s this girl.”

“Ah,” Charlotte said, smiling.

“She’s a disaster magnet. A harbinger of chaos.”

“Not least to Alice’s cold heart,” Jasper said it, more arch than he usually let himself be.

“Har, har, har, original! You ancient queen.”

“Let not ageism lead to divisions among the queens,” Jasper intoned, and dodged the little boulder Alice threw at him.

Then she went on, clearly wanting Peter and Charlotte to get the important points. “She’s human, obviously. Her number was up from the moment we met, or actually just before. Because—.” She looked with guilt toward the house. Jasper could feel the potency of her love for her brother. She continued, “Do you guys believe in… _blood singers_?”

Peter’s eyebrows shot up. “I don’t know,” he said. “Should we?”

She frowned. “Not for me. Edward—there’s something about her blood to him, it gave him a very difficult time. I know you guys don’t do the vegetarian thing. But it’s important to us, and she compromised his. And since then, she’s gotten into other kinds of danger too. I would really like that to be the end of it.”

“Of course we won’t hunt in the area,” Charlotte said. “A promise is a promise. Even if we can’t really understand—a human girl? Surely she can’t understand the kind of life you lead. We lead. Her world is totally different. It seems like a recipe for unhappiness.”

Alice grimaced. “Have you ever had a crush on someone? Tell me how this is different.”

Jasper knew that Peter and Charlotte were bewildered by Alice’s earnestness. But he also could perceive the sincerity of their promise. “We trust you,” he said. “I trust them, Alice. We’ve been friends for a long time.”

Alice, still on the defensive, shot Jasper a look. “Oh,” she said, “that’s what I hear, alright.”

Later he ran alone with Peter through the woods, not hunting precisely, although Jasper had said he would demonstrate the vegetarian method if the opportunity presented itself. He hoped it didn’t. Though he knew he was making a more ethical—and emotionally sound—choice, he was a little embarrassed to be seen so defanged. He had spent a hundred years warding off vulnerability, only to shack up with the most touchy-feely hugging-learning coven he’d come across in all that time. It was wearing away his own embattledness, his callousness as well as his shame. It had attuned his skills with so much more subtlety that the shades of fear and contempt and nationalist rage that had always been his specialties. He would not have believed, 75 years ago, that you could really be a specialist in _tenderness_, that there would have been enough to learn. How much these hand-wringing vegetarian types had taught him.

But he’d learned a lot from Peter too. How to fight, how to manipulate a crowd. How to split the truth along its many fault lines. How to tell if a man sucks dick. How to tell when it’s worth it. It pleased him a very, very great deal that Edward was unwelcoming to Peter. The saturation and shades of this emotion were many. Had Edward been able to confess this feeling, Jasper could have bestowed upon him many reassurances: this person was, by and large, my teacher. He’s older than me and he taught me a route into queerness that, yes, involved some sex, but that was the world then. Compare Peter’s ongoing disregard for human life and uneasy political allegiances, his essential _selfishness_, to the open wound of Edward’s gentleness. Edward Cullen, a walking breathing flinching conscience, a dark Roman ethical crisis clothed in muscle and straight lines and a taut, worried forehead. “You absolute dumbass,” Jasper would have liked to say to him. “If only you could look _anything _directly in the face, it could be me, and I could demolish your fears. I could demolish _you_.”

Until that happened, he’d allow Peter’s torture, as long as it didn’t include human bloodshed.

“So, this new coven,” Peter started, as they scaled a steep mountain. “Not exactly conventional.”

Jasper darted to his left to avoid a stand of cedars. “Are you kidding? The most conventional. It’s a nuclear family, for fuck’s sake.”

Peter laughed harshly. “You’re changing your definition of the conventional.”

“Well I live among the humans now. I’m adapting.”

“And not hunting them. I won’t lie to you, it doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Jasper considered this. “I understand,” he said at last. “But I’m not sure that the choice was really about sense or logic at all.”

“What was it, then?”

Jasper smiled. “A newborn vampire, a teenage girl, walked up to me in a hospital gown and said, ‘You’re Jasper Hale and we’re going to be best friends. Are you coming?’”

“Damn, is that all it takes?”

“All the rules are different for Alice.”

Peter’s voice was sharp. “Yes, I see that’s true.”

“I’m trying to go easy on her. I was young and stupid and in love once, you know.”

Peter laughed. “Not with me. Don’t even pretend. And, not to mention, that description still fits. To a tee.”

Though Jasper was becoming accustomed to having his mind and future read, it unsettled him to be read so accurately by someone without extrasensory skills other than his extreme knowledge of Jasper himself. How belittling, to be known. It made him want to eat something. “It’s none of your business, you know.”

“We used to share all our business.”

“In this family it’s hard not to. I guess we shield things even more carefully for that reason. Lots of unspoken rules.”

“You’ve never let that stop you before,” Peter pointed out, which wasn’t true. Jasper was habitually romantically timid.

“I’m not stopping anything. I’m telling you: I do things differently now. I go slow.”

“You do _venison_,” Peter said with derision.

The statement was true, and on a hundred different levels, such a damning declaration of hopeless change, that Jasper couldn’t help but laugh. There was nothing to do but run.


	16. Chapter Sixteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I don’t have my heart set on Seattle. But does that—.” Bella blushed, a process that always interrupted the rest of Alice’s day completely. Blood lit up her skin, made her radiate heat, a kind of network of humming energy between them that made Alice want to drift closer to her. Keep me warm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen to "I caught myself" and "Decode' for the duration of this chapter, yes?

Bella was avoiding the dance, but you know all that. One afternoon, as the rain cleared up, Alice said to her, “Are you—” and stopped and scowled.

“Am I what?” Bella had been eating a granola bar when Alice had appeared beside her, and she was trying to continue eating it, pretending nonchalance, which was unnecessary because Alice could hear her stuttering heartbeat. Alice found it charming that Bella tried to be nonchalant in front of her, both because it was impossible and it was not necessary. You didn’t need nonchalance when you were a velvet blanket over piano keys, folding your softness over every kind of signal.

“I was going to say, ‘Do you still have your heart set on Seattle?’ But it’s just too weird to have to ask. Usually when people have their hearts set, I know it.”

The smell of the granola bar, synthetic chocolate and sickly-sweet oats, was turning Alice’s stomach. She badly needed to hunt. She could feel the black warning of her own eyes, and the insufficient menace with which they were being received. Bella said, “When people decide, that’s when you know, right?”

Since Alice’s powers were, with regard to Bella, on the fritz, she found them unpleasant to discuss. “More or less. What do you want to do in Seattle?”

“I don’t have my heart set on Seattle. But does that—.” Bella blushed, a process that always interrupted the rest of Alice’s day completely. Blood lit up her skin, made her radiate heat, a kind of network of humming energy between them that made Alice want to drift closer to her. _Keep me warm_. Alice redirected with difficulty to the content of Bella’s words. She was continuing, “Does that mean you don’t want to go? I mean, that’s totally okay.”

Alice scowled again, offended and prickly at the girl’s uncertainty. “Of course I want to go. I just said I’ll go along to Seattle, but we can go wherever we like. Was that your real plan, or did you just make it up?”

“I made it up.” It started to rain again, and wordlessly they got into the Volvo Alice had picked her up in that morning. Her siblings would go home in the Jeep. But Alice didn’t start the car; neither of them was anxious for the day to end. Inside it, the smell of Bella’s blood was very powerful, and alongside it her more seductive scents: shampoo and the leather trim on her backpack and a more amorphous bookish Bella smell. Alice knew what it was like for her mouth to fill with venom, but this wasn’t that.

Bella went on, more confidently this time. “Actually, I did have another idea. I think we should go back to Port Angeles.”

Alice really, really wasn’t much used to being surprised anymore. She didn’t care for it. “_What_?”

“The way I figure—if I don’t go back soon, I might be too scared to ever go back, and it’s the closest place with a movie theater, so. And I’ll be with you, so no one will have to be worried about safety. And Edward—.” She broke off edgily.

Bile rose suddenly in Alice. “Edward _what_”

“Well, Edward can just _stay home_.” Bella smiled.

All the bile evaporated instantly. “Port Angeles.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you just _live _for post traumatic stress?”

“Exposure therapy. With vampire bodyguard.”

Alice frowned, thinking. “I’d rather you go with me than without me.” She’d rather Bella do most things in life with than without her, but she couldn’t say this, not yet.

“No dress shopping. Bookstore and weird antique stores and walking along the water. And ice cream. Although—that’s not much of a draw for you, is it?”

Bella was smiling. She didn’t look uncertain anymore.

“I’m _not _going back to that Italian restaurant,” Alice said. “Bad memories.”

“Oh, insensitive of me. I didn’t think—was it the garlic?” Bella smirked.

Alice thought of doing some kind of performed dramatic joke, like other teenagers did—jumping out of the car and pretending to walk away, or playfully pushing Bella out herself. But she didn’t find it fun to even joke about putting distance between them. “Ouch,” she said instead. “I’m wounded.”

Bella smiled and closed her eyes. “Port Angeles, tomorrow,” she said. “One more question.”

“Yes.”

“I have to write a paper for English. But while I write it—do you want to stay?”

Oh, Alice did.

~~~

Vampires were trained for what Esme called, polishing her French, the _longue duree. _They were very good at letting time pass. Alice had had much less practice at this than her adopted family members; she hadn’t yet passed a very long period of her eternal life. Though over a year already seemed like a long time to go without sleep, without the restart that it offered.

But to sit in Bella’s room with her, while she wrote a paper for English—she could have passed a very _longue duree _that way. Bella sat at her desk, at her ancient, blocky computer, frowning at the screen. The air was full of the scent of her hair, wet from the rain. The room was dimly lit with twinkle lights hung around the ceiling and the desk lamp, giving everything a dull gold glow. The sound of the rain on the windows ebbed and flowed. There was a big oak tree outside the house and occasionally its branches scraped at the window. Alice went to the old boom box and put on a CD, some rock band with a woman’s angry voice, and counted the things in the room that were purple. She listened to the sound of Bella’s breaths and heartbeats and shifting movements in the chair. She sat cross-legged on the nubby beige carpet and tried to probe the future for Bella. She could see the next morning until she arrived at the Swan house to pick her up. She could not see this evening until very late. She could see the coast of Port Angeles, and its main street of quaint and tired shops, but she could not walk down it in her mind. The future was getting weaker, her skills less powerful, and while this unsettled her to a surprising degree, the unsettling feeling wasn’t all bad. There was less of Bella’s absence in her future. She would take Bella’s presence rather than power. Happily.

This was the primary activity of the afternoon anyway. Alice was learning that a core part of attraction, even of love, was a minute awareness of where someone’s body was in a room, how they were standing, the flush of their skin, their proximity to her own body. When she’d become a vampire, Edward and Jasper had taught her that her ability to gauge these facts was part of her capacity as a predator. She could hear heartbeats and feel body heat on her skin; she could smell blood and fear. Her senses combined to give her, more or less, eyes in the back of her head. What Edward and Jasper had not said, though, was that these abilities were also well calibrated to track the movements, with a twisting, anxious heart, of an irrepressible and implacable human girl.

With her eyes on the screen, Bella said, “You’re staring.”

Alice was _not_, very deliberately not. She was looking out the window. “No I’m not.”

“I can feel you staring.”

“I’m looking at this big old tree.”

“Maybe you know more than one way to stare.”

Alice turned to her. Bella’s hair was falling across her back, drying now, her shoulders hunched uncomfortably over the keyboard. Alice asked, “Do you want me to go, then?”

“No,” Bella said too quickly.

Alice had to turn away to hide her smile. _Trouble, trouble. _“I’ll try not to stare with any part of my body,” she lied.

“Good,” Bella said, but she was lying too.

~~~

When Alice prepared to leave for Port Angeles in the morning, Edward said to her, “Did she tell her father you’re going?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to tell him very many things. Why?”

He frowned. “Maybe it will give you some incentive to bring her back.”

Alice’s eyebrows shot up. “Ex_cuse _me?”

He raised his hands. “It’s just precautionary.”

“I’m not going to _kill her_, you dolt. Projecting, much? I love her, okay?”

“Alice!” Esme chided, but Alice was already swirling out of the house.

~~~

Edward went to find Jasper in his room later that day. Jasper’s room was directly above Edward’s, on the top floor. He had a large television that he never watched, and a hanging hammock chair that Alice liked to commandeer while she talked at him. The walls were hung with big woodblock prints that Alice had made and foisted upon him; large looming simple shapes of birds and trees and moons in indigo and white. They gave the room a mild witchy atmosphere, improved by the knowledge that he had accepted them only to please her. Otherwise the room was spartan: a stack of books in one corner and his school props, a backpack and math textbook, in another. Like Edward’s own room, the narrow far wall was made entirely of glass, pressed up against the edge of the forest. Their view was of the same tree, separated by generations of growth.

When Edward came in, Jasper was sitting on a cushion on the floor, writing longhand in a journal. This was such a strange and non vampiric habit that Edward paused for a moment to study him. He had gotten so far into the habit of avoiding Jasper’s thoughts that he only skirted their edges now. “Hi,” he said. They’d been tentative ever since Peter had arrived, and left, and this distance was more disorienting than Edward would have liked to admit. “I was thinking of hunting today, but Emmett is helping Rose with the car. Do you want to go?”

Jasper did not immediately look up. Edward became cognizant of the bare outline of his thoughts: a controlled, roiling anger. Finally Jasper said, “Well I know how ill advised you think most secret trips are. You’d better tell Carlisle we’re going.” His voice was full of poison.

“What?”

Jasper was always controlled; he had to be. It was unnerving to learn that he had anger that could be controlled, and deployed, too. “No, it’s perfectly fair,” he said in a low voice, getting up to look out the window. The dim Olympic light made him look ghostly—a specter carved in marble. His eyes were very dark, nearly endless black. “It’s perfectly fair. You’re an absolutist, Edward. You don’t believe in self-control, not really. You only trust in _abstinence_. It’s all or nothing. So you don’t believe in Alice, and you don’t believe that I could go without hunting if I needed to.”

Edward felt that kind of shock that was more like knotting, twisting nausea. “What are you talking about?”

“I heard what you said to Alice this morning. You wanted her to have the opposite of an alibi, so that _she would be less motivated to kill Bella_.”

“Jasper—.”

“You’re always telling me that she’s a teenage girl, as if to discredit her. But she 

was right. You _were _projecting. You’re so afraid of your own drives that you think she can’t be trusted either. You’re ashamed of your lack of control. Alice has never displayed any. Alice has never spilled a human’s blood. She loves Bella. What right have you to tell her anything?”

The feeling of shame was surprisingly similar to having a human body, though he remembered it so dimly. The heaviness in your limbs, the settling fatigue, the surging of contradictory chemical reactions. Edward stretched the webbing of his hand over his eyes, pinching his temples with middle finger and thumb. “None,” he said. “I want to protect life. But I know Alice does too.”

“Protect life!” Jasper said, and a little wave of his hysteria throbbed through the room. “You’re not Carlisle, you know. You have none of his clarity. If anyone knows something about protecting life, it’s him, because he’s seen so much of it end. End, despite his best efforts. You and I—we don’t know anything about the sanctity of life. We only know our own myths. We used them to justify our own evil desires. But I can’t—.” He broke off abruptly.

He looked so upset that Edward had the suicidal desire to go and comfort him. “Jazz,”he said, his voice nearly gone.

Jasper shook his head. “I hope you can reevaluate, Edward,” he said slowly. “Alice loves you, she looks up to you. I hope you don’t teach her that the only ethical life is one without desire. She’s a gay teenager. The world already wants to teach her that. Don’t reinforce it. Or you’ll become the monster you’re always trying to disavow.”

The words were so frightening and disorienting to Edward that he turned and left the room, walking smoothly down the stairs and out of the house, where he started to run.


	17. Chapter Seventeen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Bella was beginning to think that Edward Cullen was the bane of her existence."
> 
> We're on a roll now! Barreling toward baseball (which is, as everyone knows, the end of the novel Twilight.) Declarations are coming soon!

When Edward heard someone tracking him—the footsteps before the thoughts—he assumed it was Jasper, and he felt nothing but relief. He wanted to stop running, to be given an opportunity to unburden himself, to choose weariness over flight. But it was Esme. She had a silk scarf tied over her hair to keep it from tangling on her run. Her eyes were pale golden; she and Carlisle had hunted the previous night. She put her hand up. “Don’t be angry,” she said first.

“I’m not angry,” he said quickly, and was surprised to discover it was true.

“Good.” They ran together along a stream for a few miles, and then climbed the lower hills abutting Mount Olympus.

At the top of one such hill, he said, “I suppose he sent you after me.”

“Not exactly.” Esme was serene and slow; clearly she found nothing upsetting in the conflict between her two family members. “He was upset, both at you and about how he treated you. He said, ‘I raised my voice, and I promised myself I wouldn’t do that anymore.’”

“He didn’t raise his voice,” Edward said automatically, his insides twisting. Jasper never raised his voice. He was always calm and collected and measured, never hysterical. It was the turn to anger, however calmly expressed, that had shaken Edward most. “But he was upset. I think I deserved it. I _have _been too hard on Alice. Alice is the best of us, probably. Of your children.”

Esme smiled a little. “I’m not really interested in such proclamations, one way or the other.”

“Well.” Edward picked up a pinecone and hurled it through the air until it was out of sight. They did not hear it land. “Did he send you to chastise me?”

“I think he did quite enough of that already, and he knows that. And we both know that you’re more than likely to chastise yourself plenty on your own.”

“I know.”

“Alice will forgive you, Edward. She’s highly touchy right now. She’s embarking on this fragile, exciting thing, that is, as you know—indeed dangerous. But she’ll be careful.”

He nodded. There was a lump in his throat, swelling love for his brave little sister.

“So she’s touchy about it. But she’ll forgive you. She knows how hard this entanglement with Bella has been for you. Jasper knows that too.”

Edward’s heart constricted at the swerve in conversation. His will to deny was flagging, flagging. “But will he forgive me,” he said without the intonation of a question.

“For what, darling?”

He didn’t know how to answer. He would have liked to cry, had he been able to. “Too much self-control. Not enough.”

She hesitated, didn’t answer right away. The air was fresh and pine-scented on their faces, empty of other human life. They were very alone in the woods, except that nobody is ever alone in the woods. The woods are not a lonely place, if you know how to count life. Edward did.

Finally Esme said, “I want you to understand the precision with which I’m choosing my words, my dear. Jasper loves you so _tenderly_ and with so much attention. He knows you, and he would like to know you. But he will never make demands.”

Edward nodded fiercely; there was a rising emotional _something _in him that felt like grief and like understanding. The slow and feverish death of ignorance. “Alright,” he said, “alright.”

She rubbed her thumb over her lip. “I’ll say one more thing, and then I’m through,” she said, and tugged at the crooked collar of his shirt with affected fondness. “In the kind of life that we have, the attentive kind of love is absolutely immeasurable. It’s a kind of cosmic feeling, to want to attend to somebody for a very long time. It sounds modest but it absolutely isn’t.”

Edward, who attended to everyone’s thoughts by default at great personal cost, who watched Alice attend to each one of Bella’s human needs and gestures with intense concentration, already knew this. “Thank you,” he said, and hugged his mother on the hilltop, under the pines in the failing light.

~~~

Alice was agitated when she picked Bella up. Her shoulders were tense and she did not precisely greet Bella when she slid into the car. Bella was too cowed to ask why. It was generally better to let vampires come to you with answers. Demanding had not gotten her very far.

Finally she tried to bring some levity. “Are you going to drive like a maniac today?”

“Yes,” Alice retorted, and then her face hardened. “No. I would never drive in a way that would be dangerous to you. You know that, right? The way we drive, it’s very safe for us. Our reflexes make driving much less dangerous than for the average person.”

Her intensity surprised Bella. “Of course, of course. I know that. I was just teasing.”

Alice flinched at Bella’s reaction. “Sorry. Everything’s out of whack now. I can’t _see _what’s going to happen, and something Edward said—.”

Bella was beginning to feel that Edward Cullen was the bane of her existence. “What did he say?”

“It doesn’t matter. It really, really doesn’t. We’re just going to Port Angeles on a nearly sunny day to do some post traumatic exposure therapy. And eat ice cream.”

Bella suddenly worried that the day and her planned activities seemed foolish to Alice, a seer with immortality, but she could only give half her attention to this fear. “The sun? Are you going to tell me what you meant about the sun?”

Alice’s expression softened a little. “If it’s safe. If you’re good.”

A dangerous little thrill went through Bella’s whole body. She was aware that Alice could hear her accelerating heart rate, and she thought: _good_. Let her know. She leaned back in her seat. “I categorically refuse to be good.”

“As expected,” Alice said, and turned on the radio.

In Port Angeles the sun did not shine yet; if Alice focused _very _hard, apparently, she could see the weather despite Bella’s general proximity. It was safe for them to walk down the main street, which they did. Alice insisted upon buying her an ice cream cone, and watched with curiosity while she ate it. “Don’t you remember ice cream?” Bella asked.

“The human memories get faint,” she admitted. “Everything is sort of hazy.”

“Well, it’s good. Do you want to try it, just to remember?”

Alice recoiled with comical disgust. “No, no thanks.”

“It’s cold, and sweet, and creamy—” Bella laughed. “I’m not helping, am I.”

“Have you been workshopping your vampire comedy?”

“Well the garlic joke went over so well.”

Alice’s hand shot out and she caught a melted drip of ice cream as it fell from Bella’s cone, before it could stain her gray henley shirt. It happened so fast that it took Bella’s eyes a moment to catch up. “Thanks,” she said.

Alice touched the wet fingertip to her tongue. “Not for me,” she said, but something about the gesture seemed to be satisfying.

They went into the bookstore where Bella had bought _Vampires: An Abbreviated History and Reference Guide. _“Did you ever read it?” Alice asked without explaining.

“Yes.” Bella was sheepish.

“What did you learn?”

“Nothing of value. It was a good comparative analysis, though.”

Alice smiled at her, so powerfully that Bella felt shaken, and then disappeared behind a tall bookshelf. They browsed separately for a long time, each keenly aware of the other’s movements in the room, and simultaneously absorbed in the books they were paging through. Finally Alice found Bella in the poetry section, the far back corner of the store, hidden from the clerk and front door by the cookbook shelf. Alice’s avant-garde outfit—drop crotch printed pants and tight-fitting black sweater with sleeves that her thumbs were hooked through—made her look more eccentric than fashionable here in this small understocked bookstore in a outdoor recreation tourist town. Her hair had been combed straight back from her face, in a theatrical little quiff. She was wearing nude-pink lipstick. Bella felt quite plain and countrified in her cotton henley and jeans that were a little too big. She tucked her hair behind her ear, suddenly starstruck.   
“What are you reading?” Alice said.

Bella showed her the cover of the Mary Oliver book she was holding. “We read some of her poems at my old school.”

Alice leaned against the adjoining shelf. “Read me one,” she said, and closed her eyes.

Bella thumbed to a new page. “The Kingfisher,” she began. “The kingfisher rises out of the black wave, like a blue flower, in his beak, he carries a single silver leaf. I think this is the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind a little dying.” She stopped reading.

Alice didn’t move. “Go on,” she said after a moment.

“No,” Bella said, and closed the book.

“It’s alright,” Alice insisted. “I _don’t _mind a little dying. If I did, would I be here?”

“I mind,” Bella said, and blushed. She knew this posed a temptation to Alice, all that blood shoved up against her skin, but she couldn’t help it. She was thinking of the possibility of her own death, while Alice lived on and on, but she could not articulate this, for the way it communicated the depth of her feeling.

Alice’s face fell. “I know the undead is not always the pleasantest day trip companion, but I thought—.”

Bella reached out in a hurry and grabbed Alice’s wrist—very cold, very firm, narrow and bony under Bella’s hot and fragile fingers. She could feel the blood pumping around the still coolness of Alice’s arm. “No,” she said. “That’s not what I meant. And anyway, _you’re not dead_. I was thinking of myself. Dying all the time. Just like, shedding dead cells. Shedding years. I don’t know. I’m being dramatic.”

Alice flipped her wrist so that Bella had to move hers too. Alice gently wrenched her hand free and took the opportunity to trace the blue-green line of Bella’s vein, winding its way from the heel of her hand to her elbow. Alice’s touch was so gentle that it was like a small cold breath on her skin. Neither of them breathed. Finally Alice said, “You seem to have misunderstood the poem. This surprises me based on your reading comprehension. Don’t you see, Bella, that a little bit of dying is the best part? That it’s the shedding that makes life beautiful? It’s limited and small and that gives it power. Your mortality gives you power. Over me, at least. I envy your ability to die a little bit. To change.”

Bella shook her head, though she understood. What she wanted to say was _please don’t stop touching me_. But she couldn’t speak.

“I think this is the prettiest world,” Alice repeated, “so long as you don’t mind.” She took the book from Bella’s hand. “I’m buying it.” When Bella still didn’t move, she went on, “I’m not going to kiss you here—” and didn’t finish the sentence, though Bella knew it was a delicious little threat, a generous invitation to seeing the future. 


	18. Chapter Eighteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone kisses!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting this double-consummation scene on my birthday! Thanks for all your generous readership and comments over the last long year of this story (although it's not over yet), it's been so fun and encouraging to me. Now: gays kiss!

As Alice and Bella walked toward the water, Alice stopped short on the sidewalk. “Shit,” she said quietly, her eyes far away.

“A vision?” Bella asked pleasantly, drawing close to her.

Alice put up two fingers. “Only one concerns us,” she said, “but oh wow—Edward. Finally!” She lightly tapped Bella on the shoulder with her open palm, gleeful now, and repeated, “Finally!”

“What did Edward do?” Bella asked, feeling fond of him because he was far away.

“Come on,” Alice said, tugging on the zipper of Bella’s jacket. “The sun is coming.”

They walked down the way they’d came and made a left turn toward the water, on the way crossing the alley where Bella had been attacked. “You don’t have to look,” Alice said.

“I do. Just for a second.” She peered into the dank alley where she had, briefly, thought she might die. She had been reminded of her ultimate vulnerability as a woman, and more than that, as a girl. And then Alice, a girl seemingly half her size, had appeared out of nowhere and stopped it. It seemed more than miraculous.

She could feel Alice watching her. “You knew I was there because Edward could read their minds. That’s why you brought him.”

“Yes,” Alice said.

Bella could very faintly feel the impression of Alice’s cold fingertips on the side of her hip, barely touching her. It was a galvanizing contact. She turned to her. “Edward told me that I’m too powerful a person.”

“Oh?”

“I didn’t feel like it that night. All the power came from you.”

Alice looked away, out toward the water. “Do you know what I”m going to say, Bella?”

“No.”

She looked back at her. “More than one kind of power.” Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Alice grinned. “I’m happy to be your muscle. Now. Are you ready to go? We need to be careful, of the sun.”

Bella was. “Does the sun hurt you? How are we careful?”

“I said I would show you, yes? It doesn’t hurt me. We just need to stay out of sight.”

Alice led them by instinct through streets that grew narrower, a row of dilapidated houses and then two blocks of nicer ones closer to the water. She said she could see the place they would go—at least until Bella arrived there. “What is it?”

“Can’t describe it. Just see it,” Alice said, and unceremoniously jumped down onto a low, rickety dock at the edge of the sea. She put forth a tiny, fragile-looking hand to help Bella down;her grip, as Bella now well knew, was tight and cold and careful.

“Forgive me for not trusting the psychic, but isn’t this a bit of a dead end?”

The dock ran twenty feet into the water and ended abruptly. There were far more impressive parts of the port 100 yards to the east of them. Alice gestured west. There was another dock, a sturdier one, twenty feet to their left. “You want to trust me, then trust me,” Alice said, smiling, and gestured for Bella to get on her back.

Bella, who had six inches and thirty pounds on Alice, hesitated. “I’ll crush you.”

“You must be joking. Do you want me to go lift that freighter? Do I need to prove something to you?”

“Can you actually lift a freighter?”

“No, Bella. Please get on my back before the sun comes out.”

Bella complied. The smell of the sea was strong and fresh around them, but stronger, all of a sudden, was that Alice scent she could never place. Alice didn’t waver an inch as Bella climbed on her back. She looked around to find the quiet port empty of onlookers, then took a cursory two steps’ running start and leapt with unbelievable grace the twenty feet over the water. They landed on the opposing dock without hardly rocking it. “Wow,” Bella breathed.

“I have not exploited your amazement nearly enough.” This dock was private and protected by a locked gate; from its far edge, they could leap once more to a protected, hidden little stretch of beach. It probably belonged to someone who came from Arizona or New Mexico to spend the summer in Port Angeles, and the house was empty now. The little beach was rocky and fringed by spruce trees. Alice let Bella down and they explored the little stretch for a while. Alice, in an elegant crouch on the edge of the shore, showed her her trick of flicking rocks and skipping them across the water. Though the water in question was the Salish Sea, the trick still worked.

Bella sat delicately on a small boulder next to her. She had been queueing up a question. “Why did we come to this particular spot?”

Alice sent a perfectly round stone skittering across the roiling water. “Because I saw it in my vision.”

“But didn’t you see it in your vision because we ultimately decided to come here?”

“Ah,” Alice said, and sat back. “That’s the snake eating its own tail question, the classic one. Do I have a vision because I’m going to do something? Do I do something because I have a vision?”

Bella studied her, her tiny curled frame looking rather high fashion against the backdrop of rocky beach, punctuated by scattered petrified tree branches. Across the Salish was Canada; the border was technically in the water somewhere. She asked Alice, “Do those questions bother you?”

“No,” Alice said immediately. “Well, yes. It’s sort of like I don’t have free will, but the rules are being set only by myself. By my own foresight. It’s irrational.”

“Have you ever tried to contradict a vision?”

“Not really. I’ll tell you the question that bothers me more.”

“Okay,” Bella said when Alice didn’t immediately go on.

Still she didn’t reply. She was looking at the water, and then, with less poetic serenity, down at her hands. It seemed as if she trying to bring herself to say something. Finally she did. “When I—woke up. When I’d been turned, I had my first vision, and I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what I was. The vision was of you. And I haven’t been able to see you since then. It was the first and only time. And I have no idea why.”

Bella took a long moment to process this. “So you _have _seen me.”

“Yes.”

“What happened in the vision?”

“Nothing really. We were in the woods. You were—afraid. It could change, Bella. It doesn’t mean it’s accurate.”

Bella wasn’t afraid; she was trying to assemble a mystery. “Is this like the snake eating its tail, then? Did you come to find me?”

Alice’s expression was overwritten with shame. “It’s not easy to answer that. I told you, I don’t know how to tease out my choices. I saw Jasper, and found him. We came to find the Cullens. I _knew _I would find you. I didn’t pick Forks, I’ll tell you that. But I knew.”

Bella didn’t reply.

“You want to run screaming. It’s okay. I can take you back. Or you can run, if you want. I don’t blame you.”

“I don’t want to run away from you,” Bella said. She was angry that Alice had even suggested it. “You should really think more of me.”

“Bella,” Alice said, ferventness in her voice. She turned to look up into Bella’s face. “I think everything of you. Do you hear what I’m saying? I’m telling you everything. Against all rules natural and supernatural, I saw you. Do you have any idea how much you mean to me?”

Bella twisted so she was on her knees on the rock, and kissed her. That was all. It felt gentle and inevitable and very safe.

But heat and cold meeting, in meteorological terms, causes weather, and so after a moment there was a new storm in this kiss. Alice’s lips were hard and cold but also compelling, working against Bella’s mouth, breathing her sweet and fragrant breath over Bella, her hand coming up to hold the small of Bella’s back. After a moment Bella’s hair was in both their mouths and they had to pull back, grinning, to remove it. The kiss resumed immediately, the way something can be both one long cosmic kiss and a series of individual, highly charged gestures: touches with the hands, kissing a neck, tilting faces one way and then the other, bumping noses just a little bit, teasing an ear. It was the first kiss either of them had ever had.

Bella rucked up Alice’s experimental sweater in the back and put her hands on Alice’s smooth back. Alice hissed in pleasure at the warmth and softness of her hands. Alice raised two fingers, adorned with rings, to tuck back a strand of Bella’s hair. Bella whispered, “Is this dangerous, for you? Is this too much temptation?”

She closed her eyes, let the ocean air wash over her face. “I’ve never felt less dangerous,” she said. She pressed her face into Bella’s chest, a solid, beautiful thing pressed hard against her sternum and frayed shirt. She whispered into the fabric, “I love you.”

They were on the edge of the world—the edge of the United States, which was the whole of their world—teetering on the very edge of something. Beyond them was the ocean and a great void. But it did not feel dangerous.

Then, as the kiss was fading, the sun came out. Everything was prisms of light.

~~~

When Esme and Edward returned to the house, Esme went upstairs to Carlisle’s study to read quietly with him. Carlisle and Esme were the kind of couple who could orbit each other, with a kind of affectionate and disinterested proximity that Edward had always envied.

He went in search of Jasper, and found him standing on the back veranda of the house, a huge expanse of treated cedar wood that gave directly onto the creek and dense forest. It was Edward’s favorite place. Jasper was standing against the railing, peering intently into the woods. His hair was curly from the humidity of the recent rain, tucked behind his ears, and he was very still. For the first time in weeks, Edward opened himself to hearing his thoughts, and found, perhaps not unexpectedly, a tumult of feeling, not words: regret and anger and ardentness, and, as Esme had warned him, tenderness. Edward knew little about vampire biology, nobody did, but he felt that his insides were made of a hundred small drawbridges, badly constructed, and all of them were being weakly let down. Come ashore, if the foundation will hold; come across if you don’t mind the prospect of getting wet.

Jasper turned when Edward came outside. It was not raining now; the sun was shining wanly and Jasper’s skin had a dull, pale shimmer of light on it. He was tall. When Edward let down the drawbridge to physical attraction, the floodwaters rose and he drowned in them. The feeling of liking to look at someone’s body, of wanting to touch it, was fundamentally _disruptive._Edward watched a flicker of his feelings reach Jasper’s awareness as it crossed his face. Edward wouldn’t speak first. When you could read someone’s thoughts, you had to let them decide which ones to present to you, in official terms.

“You left,” Jasper began, “before I could soften my tirade. I did all the worst parts first.”

“I deserved them.”

“Yes, you did.” He wasn’t joking. “I’m angry that you hurt Alice. That you put your own mortal fears on her. That’s still true.”

“I know. I’ll apologize to her.”

“I know you will. You always makes things right, because you’re a fundamentally unselfish person.” Jasper made a very small accidental sound, almost like a sob. Edward realized that Jasper was very afraid.

“Take a walk with me,” Edward said, very quietly, concrete crumbling in his heart. “Away from the house.”

“Why?” Jasper turned to look Edward in the eye, and his eyes—their goldenness, their intended and occluded blueness—impressed themselves upon Edward with immense power.

“Come on.” They both leapt easily over the railing of the deck and landed on the soft grass and moss at the edge of the creek bed. Then they stepped over the creek and walked into the trees, which were so heavy with moss and ferns that a deep and spongy silence overtook them quickly.

Jasper was resolving himself to clarify his position. “As I say, I’m angry about you hurting Alice, but I’m also angry with myself. I was cruel to you earlier. I was self-righteous and far too harsh. I’m sorry for that.”

Edward considered. “I think you’re right on both counts. It hurt me, what you said. But it hurt more because I could see that you were projecting too. And because—” he faltered. “I could see how much my own obsession with abstinence of every kind has hurt you. My fanaticism—isn’t victimless.”

Jasper averted his gaze, his thoughts full of shame. It seemed that he thought Edward meant that he had been ultimately unsuccessful in concealing his desires. “You really don’t have—” he began, but didn’t finish.

“No,” Edward said. “You were right. I _have _always felt that a moral life would involve staunching desire of every kind. With the kind of life we have—with the creatures we are—we’re controlled by this unnatural desire already, and Carlisle taught me how to fight it. But I think I overgeneralized the lesson. I have always thought that admitting _any _kind of drive would take me away from myself. Away from an awareness of how to do the right thing.”

“Edward—” Jasper said, desperate and fretful. “You don’t—”

“I promise, I’m almost done. I’ve just been thinking about this for the last hour. What I was going to say was, what all this meant is that I just thought it was impossible to think that—. That my body might be able to teach me something.”

Jasper’s chin went up. He had his back against a massive cedar, still dripping above from the earlier rain. “If that hypothesis was wrong—” he said, and his Adam’s apple bulged as he swallowed. “What could it teach you?”

Edward crowded him against the tree, their bodies inches apart. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. “It would teach me that there was no moral high ground in putting this off,” he said.

Kissing Jasper was almost unbearably pleasurable, so pleasurable that Edward was reminded that he believed in sin. But he didn’t care. He’d go to hell, he’d do it thoroughly. He pressed his lips to Jasper’s, felt their surprising softness, the thrill of Jasper kissing back. His hair brushed Edward’s cheek. He bit down on Jasper’s lower lip and felt him gasp. Jasper’s hands at his waist were harsh and strong, pulling him where he wanted them. Their chests met. Edward’s hands were looped around Jasper’s neck, reaching up to encircle him. He opened his mouth further and when Jasper took the opportunity, made a small and embarrassing sound.

His body was coursing with heat and rightness and a kind of electric thrill that made little sense to him until Jasper, first tentatively and then with firmness, pressed his thigh between Edward’s legs. Edward cried out. His hands ripped Jasper’s jacket in half without being aware of it. Jasper’s fingers were on his face, tilting his chin up to kiss him, and Edward accepted this with a kind of frenzy of submission. Everything in him was saying _yes_.

It wasn’t until Jasper gulped out, “_Edward_—” that he realized Jasper was being similarly affected. When Edward pulled back, against every instruction from his body, he saw that Jasper’s pupils were blown, his lips wet and full, his breathing rapid. “_Why_,” he said, but he didn’t say it aloud. He was letting Edward into his thoughts. _Why today_.

Edward clamped his hand around the back of Jasper’s neck. He brought his face down a little to kiss him. Before he did, he said, “I couldn’t wait anymore.”

“I would have waited,” Jasper promised, breathing hard. “I would have waited a long time.”

Edward’s heart, technically a dead and fossilized piece of flesh, swelled to the point of pain. He pressed his face hard into Jasper’s cheekbone, his forehead. “I know,” he said. “You were so patient, I know you’re patient. But I—but I had to touch you.”

“Don’t stop,” Jasper begged, his voice weakening, his resolve and his reserve gone forever. So Edward obeyed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Port Angeles is built on the stolen lands of the Coast Salish and Klallam peoples.


	19. Chapter Nineteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I really tried to work "you are my life now" in a repurposed way into this section somehow, but it turns out that phrase is just... too much. no matter what you do with it.
> 
> Also, Rosalie's mean in this chapter, if that does it for you.

It was a kiss without an immediate aftermath. It went on for ages; vampires, as you’ll remember, have a loose and stretchy conception of time. There were acres of skin, seemingly, to be touched. Hair to pull, neck-hairs to raise, lips to bite. Scars to trace.

Everyone’s clothes stayed on.

Jasper knew that Edward knew this was because he didn’t want to rush him. There was lots of time. And anyway, there was a central pleasure in simply not hiding how much he wanted to. And then there was an absolutely chief pleasure in Edward gasping, entirely without control of himself, “_Jazz_.”

“Sorry,” Jasper said, unapologetically. He was overwhelmed and exhilarated and extremely hard. He was sitting on the ground with Edward on top of him, not doing anything to conceal his hardness but not doing anything to present it, either.

“You’ll kill me,” Edward said, and rolled off, crushing a small colony of ferns.

“Where are you going?”

“You’ll kill me,” he repeated, breathing hard theatrically.

“It’s good for you to be stretched a little bit,” Jasper observed, unable to conceal his smile.

“You stretch me plenty,” Edward said, his face ambiguous. His eyes were on Jasper’s body still, roving.

They were quiet a little while, listening to each other’s breathing and extrasensory signals. “I hardly know anything about your skill,” Edward said after a while. “What do you pick up from me now?”

Jasper rolled over to look at him. “Dangerous question.”

“I’m all about danger now. I’m learning to embrace it.”

_Oh_, Jasper thought, _you are the most dangerous thing that’s ever happened to me_. Then he realized that he wasn’t cloaking his thoughts from Edward and Edward wasn’t avoiding them. But he didn’t revoke it. He turned his attention to Edward’s emotional aura, a thing Jasper could perceive as if it had a kind of tangible atmosphere—color, scent, temperature, density. He tasted it. “You’re anxious,” he said. “And sort of—dizzy. And happy, and very very relieved. And immensely turned on.”

Edward huffed, embarrassed. “Does that fall under the category of emotion?” He wasn’t denying it.

“I said I could sense it, I didn’t say how.” Edward’s arousal was indeed evident to him through the most basic visual and sensory information, but he could also feel it in the air—hot and urgent and tempting to the point of pain.

“Hush.”

_No_, Jasper thought.

“What would I find in your feeling-aura, if I could sense it?”

“You can read my thoughts, Edward.”

“Surely you know this has given me no special ability to understand emotions.”

This made Jasper laugh, harder than he’d have thought possible. Harder than he’d laughed in a long time. He felt the tension pouring out of him and soaking into the soil, inert. Finally he said, “Alright. You’d find joy in me. Scary scary joy.”

Edward was quiet, and then said, “It is the most frightening emotion, isn’t it?”

“By far.”

“What do you want, Jasper?”

It was a question Jasper had never expected to be asked. He did not have an answer prepared. He had gone through life without expecting anyone to be interested in his wants. Nevertheless, his mind went traitorously to the obvious thing—kneeling between Edward’s legs, taking his cock into his mouth. He saw Edward hear this train of thought and flinch, but not in revulsion. Jasper reorganized his thoughts in a hurry. He grazed a fern with his fingers and said out loud, “This.”

“Yes,” said Edward, placid and certain.

“I want to not hide my desire to be close to you. That’s all. That’s all for now.”

Edward rose in a quick movement and came to lay his head, with immense care and delicacy, in Jasper’s lap. “Don’t, then,” he said.

Jasper ran his fingertip along Edward’s hairline, toward where it descended into his sideburn. Though it was impossible, he swore he saw goosebumps rise. “What do you want, Edward?” He asked, but his voice was hoarse, overcome.

Edward shifted his weight so his cheek and jaw were pressed into Jasper’s thigh. “Now?” He said. “What else could I want?”

Jasper didn’t answer.

Edward sighed. “I’ve learned what kinds of strong impulses are destructive and which aren’t. This isn’t. Now I only want to atone for the destructive ones. That and I want—I want to make you feel good.”

Jasper shivered.

“I think—what I really want, if I could—I want to sleep. Next to you.”

Jasper couldn’t speak.

“Even for an hour.”

A little coldfront of grief covered the forest floor. They wanted sleep; they wanted goosebumps. Jasper raked his hand through Edward’s hair, thinking, _I get to do this. He wants me to do this. _That could be enough.

After a long time, Edward raised his head. “There’s one more thing I want. I’d like to take you somewhere.”

“Oh?”

“This place I know. A better spot than this.”

_A spot for what? _It didn’t matter. They started to run.

When they came into the meadow, the sun was shining. Edward’s skin was incandescent with light. It was almost hard to look at him. It all felt like the best kinds of danger. “I’m going to give you a nickname,” Jasper said.

“No you’re not.”

“You’ll like it.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Yes, Ted.”

“You’re being absurd. I can’t speak to you when you’re like this. Look at the wildflowers, please. Look at the sun on the grass.” Jasper had never seen him like this. He was so happy and so uncontrolled as to be almost unrecognizable. Jasper himself had crumpled the collar of his shirt in a way that Edward would never have usually allowed.

It _was _beautiful. They stood for a moment, taking it in. The sun was warm and it would have been a good place to sun themselves, like reptiles. _Like the reptiles we are_, a morose and self-pitying version of Edward would have replied. But it didn’t seem like him now.

“I think I knew a boy in my one-room school called Ted,” Jasper observed. “He had rather soulful eyes.”

Edward tackled him, gently, and brought him down to the earth. The smell of grass and pines and freshwater was all around them.There was a pinecone under Jasper’s shoulder blade. There was the heavy weight of a man on his stomach and hips. “This has made you brazen,” Edward said.

“Yes, probably so.”

“Why’s that?”

“Not often have I been kissed by ostensibly straight and very good-looking men of my acquaintance.”

Edward was restraining a complicated expression, both sheepishness and pleasure. “But it’s not the first time.”

Jasper grinned. “I knew you were jealous about Peter.”

Edward made a little growl of annoyance, a cursory signal of such _investment _and honesty that it moved Jasper a little. “If I were, would that jealousy be justified?”

“If you _were_, of course.”

“If I were.”

“Edward, good grief. Yes, Peter and I have _known each other carnally_. It was about eighty years ago. Probably ninety. He taught me some things that you might appreciate.”

Edward looked confused and skeptical. “Like what?”

Jasper smirked. “Do you want me to show you?”

Edward averted his eyes, embarrassment blooming in the air. Jasper eased out from under him, so they were not so intimately arranged. They were quiet for a long time, absorbing both the stillness and the ceaseless small activity of the meadow. Then Jasper said, “There are two things I’ll say for now. First, you should know already that I care only for you. Second, I never intend to rush you into anything. There’s a lot of time.”

Edward tilted to the side to kiss him, a kiss with nearly verbal communicative power. He threaded his hand into Jasper’s hair. “I won’t run away,” he whispered.

Jasper knew it was the biggest promise he knew how to make on this, this first and most seismic day. His throat felt tight. “Okay,” he said, “Okay.”

~~~

When Edward and Jasper returned from the woods, very late, Emmett and Rosalie were sitting on the front steps of the house, talking and looking at the stars. When they saw their so-called siblings approach the house—not touching but having been missing together for hours—Rosalie said, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Yes, good evening,” Edward said. He turned to Jasper and said, “I’m going to find Carlisle,” and Jasper nodded, having expected this. He sat down next to Emmett on the steps and looked skyward. Emmett said, “Up is down, black is white, day is night.”

“You haven’t been paying attention, then,” Jasper told him.

“Don’t be smug.” Rosalie stood up and bent over Jasper, grabbed his chin hard to look into his eyes. “You’ve really gone and done it, haven’t you?”

“Don’t get it twisted. I didn’t do anything. He came over to me.”

“And did what?” Emmett asked.

“Oh Jesus, Emmett,” Rosalie groaned.

“No I’m in the _ballpark_,” he persisted. “I’m not totally clueless.”

“What, then, are you asking for details?” Jasper asked, cracking a smile.

Emmett laughed. “Yeah, sure. Tell me every last filthy detail.”

“Edward’ll kill me. No, I’ll kill you. You don’t need to know.” Jasper was disconcerted by how much he liked this phrase, _Edward’ll kill me_, as if it told the whole story,

Emmett guffawed. Then he stood up and clapped Jasper with thunderous power on the shoulder. “Congratulations, man, or whatever. I’m honestly so happy. You’ve both been so goony for months. This is a breakthrough.” Then he went into the house and left the Hales alone.

Jasper was waiting with mild bemusement to hear Rosalie’s unfiltered reaction. He was so high on love and sex and confession that nothing could truly bother him.

Rosalie was dressed in a silk kimono, her hair tied up in ribbony curlers. She was a statuesque tribute to great oceanic blondness. It did nothing for Jasper personally but he had a kind of aesthetic and affective appreciation for her imperiousness. She said, “I hope he’s not going to torment you about this.”

“About what, exactly?”

She made a little irritated sound. “What did he even say?”

“I appreciate it, but you don’t need to manage this for me, Rose. I’m not so naive.”

She didn’t appear convinced.

He was willing to double down. “He kissed me. He came into the woods to kiss me. Believe me—it was very serious.”

Her perfect eyebrows shot up. “Edward _Cullen_?” The name sounded parodic—and, probably only to an ear as well cultivated as Jasper’s, discretely fond—in her mouth. Edward and Rosalie had been living together for a very long time.

“I don’t know what came over him, frankly. I was extremely mad at him this morning. I gave him a very harsh dressing down over Alice.”

Rosalie smirked at the myriad entendres of the phrase.

“Oh, don’t start.”

“It was Esme,” she said. “She went after him when he ran away. She must have said something to him.”

“Then I’ll have to thank her.”

She was quiet, and then she said in her precise, cold little way, “I just don’t know why you’re willing to do this to yourself.”

“I don’t have any idea what you mean.”

“Jazz—you’re so masochistic. Are there no other vampire boys for you to kiss and talk philosophy with? You pick the most repressed and self pitying brother I have _ever _had. And someone already in the family, who you’re doomed to spend all this time with when things go wrong.”

Jasper frowned. “Caprice is unpretty on you.”

Rosalie tossed her hair.

“You assume I haven’t given this any serious thought, when I have. And you assume that Edward isn’t capable of change. You should have heard him today.”

“He’s been pulling you around for months. He’s made you miserable.”

Jasper’s insides felt cold and still. “Don’t pretend you’re saying this to protect me. You’re being cruel because you resent this happening under your nose. But Rose—we’re _not _static, not essentially. Edward’s been wrestling with this since we met. Today he made peace with it. He came to me to try.”

She looked surprised and a little impressed by the vehemence of the speech. “Alright,” she said, hands up as if to profess innocence. “I wouldn’t go into it, but you’re your own man, you can do what you like.”

“You’ve never thought that much of Edward as it is,” he said, feeling protective.

“I didn’t know you did either.”

Jasper was realizing in a new way that he _did _think a lot of Edward, in addition to finding him achingly beautiful, and this despite the way Edward had tormented his finer feelings for a number of months. Although he was indeed repressed and personally closeted, he was an essentially kind person, characterized by integrity and fidelity, and a fierce, dogged intelligence. Jasper thought a great deal of him. He swallowed.

Rosalie, seeming to observe this with X-ray vision, said, “Well, I suppose you do. Jesus, between you and Alice, everybody’s taking wild risks these days. Wild romantic risks, I mean.”

“Maybe it’s Forks.” Jasper looked up into the trees around them. “Is she back?”

“No. We were waiting for her more than you. I’d guess she’s with Bella.” Rosalie raised one eyebrow in the most minimal effort of salaciousness.

“Sleeping, no doubt. Watching her sleep.”

“Where did they even go?” Rosalie asked. Her skin was silver in the deep darkness, visible only to vampiric and feline eyes. Her eyes roved restlessly over the edge of the woods.

Jasper didn’t want to tell, but he knew Rosalie would find out anyway. “Port Angeles.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“It was Bella’s choice, apparently.”

Rose didn’t answer.

“Carlisle took care of that guy, you know. He turned him in, in Oregon. It’s a safe place again.”

“Oh, Jazz,” she said in a very quiet voice. “It’s never about a guy, is it? One guy. It’s in the air. Violence is baked into things.”

Jasper thought about something Edward had told him: that when they’d rescued Bella in Port Angeles, speeding away in the Volvo, Alice had been thinking murderous thoughts about her attacker. _Control yourself_, Edward had said, knowing her mind. Alice had said, _I’m not a violent person_. Though it was this event that had made her entertain the idea of violence for the very first time. Jasper had not been a violent person until he had. The same was true of Rosalie, though her justification was most sound. Alice’s too. Jasper had never been able to justify his own acts of violence, committed many decades ago, and his failure to explain them had, at the time, only intensified his need for them. Violence is its own justification if you give it its head.

But Edward. Edward, a person with deep and pervasive flaws, had always been committed to gentleness. He was Carlisle’s disciple in this, but with none of Carlisle’s severe flawlessness or untouchability. Edward both understood complexity and was dedicated to pushing through it, toward goodness. Jasper felt a little swell of love go through him, dangerous and salted and hot.

“Yes, it is,” he said to Rosalie. “Violence is set in stone in this country. And in everywhere.”

She looked toward where the moon should have been, had there been one. “Emmett doesn’t understand violence,” she said. “He can hunt animals of course but he fundamentally doesn’t understand human violence. That’s why I married him.”

Jasper thought immediately that Edward, plagued by scent-visions of Bella Swan, did understand violence. It was the depth and pain of his understanding that led him to gentleness. “I know,” he said, hearing his own accent emerge.

“But you and I?” She said, turning toward him. “You and I understand it. We shouldn’t have to, but we do.”

He nodded, honored by the transparency of the affiliation. “Edward too,” he said. “He’s the same.”

A little glimmer of skepticism, which he would not fully understand until later, crossed her face. But she said only, “I’m betraying my curiosity here, but—do you love him?”

It felt like both a gigantic and a nonsensical question. “Course I do,” Jasper said, feeling tired somehow. “Of course I do.”

When he went into the house, Edward was still with Carlisle. Jasper went into his room and sat on the rug and listened to music. Later, near sunrise, Alice not yet returned, Edward knocked on the door and came in. He had changed his clothes and was now dressed, with subtle magnificence, in slim-fitting black T-shirt and gray jeans. He was anxious and fraught and analytical. Jasper flooded the room with calm—with the closest thing to sleep he could manufacture. He watched it wash over his love’s face.

Edward came into the room and laid down with his head in Jasper’s lap. The room was warm and scented very slightly with sandalwood, and Dolly Parton and then Brahms were playing very low. They remained that way until the sun had risen entirely, and Alice came creeping into the house in yesterday’s clothes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoy! More Bella and Alice next chapter!


	20. Chapter Twenty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You are not a very good psychic, did you know that?”  
“Ask me whether I’m about to tackle you.”  
The feeling of Bella’s chin in her shoulder—the rub of her shin against Alice’s pants—the mini-lantern string lights above them—the breath of spearmint and heat and fatigue—the wet hair making patterns on Alice’s sweater. It was too good. Nobody should be allowed to have it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking with this story. One question: do you want sex scenes? They can happen but only if you want them! let me know in the comments.

As a rule, and by default, Carlisle often took the spare bedroom in the houses the Cullens occupied as his study. This room served as a place for him to catch up on his paperwork and pay household accounts, but it also had a chair for Esme to read or work in, and hosted many family conversations and tete-a-tetes. Carlisle and Edward, who had been tete-a-teting longer than anyone else in the family, had a special habit of this. So it was with a sense of familiarity, as well as fear, that Edward climbed the stairs to the third floor now.

It was nearly three o’clock in the morning, and Esme was elsewhere, probably doing household chores or learning Italian, as befitted the nighttime activities of Edward’s adoptive mother. So Carlisle was alone in the study, one lamp on, reading Descartes. “Hello,” he said when Edward knocked on the open door. “Please come in, no, no, just reading.”

Edward felt as he took the forest green chair opposite Carlisle’s, as he had done hundreds of times in dozens of houses, that he was a fundamentally changed person. But possibly Jasper wouldn’t agree with that description. He’d tap Edward’s chest. _This was sleeping. Biding its time. _

Well, Edward was awake. “Can we talk?” He asked his father, his voice strangled.

Carlisle opened his hands, as if to say, _Do you need to ask_?

“Descartes, is it?”

Carlisle smiled. “I’m given to these flights of fancy. Esme said she thought I’d find it stultifying, and so of course I had to go and dive in. It’s not stultifying, but it’s not a comic book, either.”

“Descartes is very theological,” Edward said.

“Is he? I suppose that’s the reputation. Mostly I’m just trying to keep up.” Carlisle made a show of putting the book away. “How can I help you?”

Edward didn’t know; he didn’t know whether he needed help. He felt that he was afloat in both the greatest crisis and the greatest joy of his life. He drafted a hundred ways to begin the conversation in his head. “Today,” he finally began, “Esme caught up with me in the woods. Did she tell you about that?”

“Not in any detail. Should she have?” It appeared to bemuse Carlisle to consider Edward and Esme keeping secrets from him.

“No, it’s alright. She came after me I suppose because—I’d had a disagreement with Jasper, and I was upset.”

“Alright.” Carlisle did not seem willing to jump to conclusions, which might have embarrassed Edward but would have also saved him some trouble.

“Esme—.” He hesitated, but there was never any point in delaying the truth with Carlisle. And anyway, he didn’t want to. “Esme pointed out that the reason Jasper might have been hard on me—other than my deserving it, I was very harsh on Alice this morning—but the main reason might have been that Jasper had—had feelings for me. And when we talked about this, it helped me understand that I had been denying something for a long time. Do you understand what I mean?”

Carlisle’s face was carefully impassive; in his thoughts Edward knew that he was reinforcing a hundred suspicions while also reserving conclusion. “Not yet,” he said, “but I’m beginning to. Don’t be worried, just go on.”

“Well.” Edward didn’t particularly feel like reiterating his speech to Jasper about overgeneralizing the fear of desire. For one, it had been an intimate and romantic conversation, one he’d like to keep between the two of them; for another thing, he didn’t want Carlisle to feel like Edward’s hesitations were his fault. “Talking to Esme, and thinking how bad I felt when Jasper was angry with me—it made me realize.”

“Go on, it’s alright,” Carlisle murmured very gently. Edward realized that Carlisle was afraid that Edward would perceive homophobia in him, which wasn’t exactly true or untrue. But it made Edward realize, too, how volatile, how fragile and tentative, he appeared to his family. On the heels of all that here he was to declare a gay love affair.

“It made me realize that I was in love with him,” he said, knowing as he said the words that they were true. “That I have been, since he came here. But you know—you’ve always known me, and I didn’t think I could be gay, or interested in men, and the idea really frightened me. I suppose I thought that by repressing the instinct to try it, I could—move towards holiness. Or atone. For the other kinds of unholiness that this is.” He gestured vaguely to his body. “I guess that’s rather theological too.”

Carlisle was frowning, thinking hard, his thoughts too tangled for Edward, in his anxiety, to organize. Then he said, “How about this: tell it to me without theology. Do it another way.”

The task was more difficult than Edward would have expected, which made him think that he might be a bit of a pretentious asshole. He spent a long time drafting the sentence, revising it for honesty and for philosophical language. Finally he said, “I didn’t think that I should get to be with someone like him. But he made it too hard to keep on thinking that. So I let it go. Because he already loved me.”

There was something immensely emotional in his father’s face, when he looked up to see it. It was an intense nearness to impossible tears. “Edward,” he said, “Give up theology, okay?”

It made something tight in Edward’s chest too, not for Jasper but for his father, who saw and understood him with such emotional depth and intellectual height. “I don’t know how,” he said, his voice hoarse and small.

Carlisle turned away for a moment, wiping at tears as if they were really there. “I think you do,” he said, with half a laugh, “Or you don’t, and he’s teaching you. Let him teach you.”

Edward didn’t know how to reply.

“Jasper is an extremely intelligent person,” Carlisle went on. “Which of course you know. But he’s also highly intuitive. He gets to the heart of things very quickly. As you see here, he won’t let you dally. Or deny. I think he will be very good for you. Or rather, he already has. I’ve seen the way he’s loved you quietly for several months. Through one of the greatest crises of your life as a vampire.” Carlisle chuckled in a little spasm of happy disbelief. “I told him to go after you in Alaska, you know. I thought he might be able to bring you back.”

“He did,” Edward said, dizzy with affection for the whole Cullen family project. He felt love around him like the stretched polyester walls of a hammock, taut and thin and tear-resistant.

“But you’ll be good for him too. He’s kept himself from displaying any feelings at all. I think he’s resigned himself to loneliness. And you will break him out of it.”

Edward remembered Jasper’s only answer to the question _What do you want? _He’d said, _I want to not hide my desire to be close to you. _Jasper’s desire was to want openly and without apology. It was the dream of somebody who’d loved men for a really long time, and loved Edward longer than he would have admitted.

“I do want to help him. He’s helped me so much.”

Carlisle nodded, quick and sure. “Then you have everything you need.” He hesitated and looked appraisingly at Edward’s face. “Or do you?”

Edward bit his lip. “I just—you really don’t mind? For Jasper and I, to have a kind of romantic—” He was dreadfully embarrassed.

“_Mind?_” Carlisle was incredulous at the question. “No one lives as long as I have without gathering a rather expansive perspective on romantic entanglements. Though I admit to being shamefully conventional myself.” There was that pang again, Edward envying the simplicity and completeness of Carlisle and Esme’s love.

“Well, thank you,” he said awkwardly.

“You don’t need to thank me.” Carlisle sat down in his chair again, swiveling back toward the desk to find a piece of paper. “Oh—one last piece of advice. As you try this out, your new maybe-gay life? It wouldn’t hurt to get your inspiration from Alice.”

~~~

When they approached Bella’s house again, only one light on, Alice said, “Did you get what you wanted from Port Angeles?”

Bella tilted her head. “Yeah,” she said, “yeah I did.”

Alice laughed quietly. “Me too.” She slid her hand over Bella’s larger, warm one on the console. “A lot more dramatic things I could say. But you are so good at poetic understatement.” They had pulled up on the curb next to the house; Alice was not brave enough for the driveway. “Are you cold?”

Bella put her arms around herself instinctively but said, “No.”

Alice wished so badly that she could put her arms around her to warm her; even that she could give Bella her coat, saturated with her body heat. But Alice was a heat sink and she had worn no coat. Under her sweater she wore nothing at all.

Bella went on, “What do you mean, poetic understatement? Wait, what do you mean, you could say more dramatic things?”

“I mean that you’re very good at saying just what you mean without oversaying it. And I mean—that in _my _case, I could say that today was one of the best days of my life. Immortal or otherwise. I already did say that I love you.”

Bella blushed. “Do you mean that you’re afraid that I won’t say it back?”

“No,” Alice said, because that was exactly what she was afraid of.

Bella leaned over the console with wonderful human clumsiness. Up close her scents were overwhelming. Alice felt a surge of desire that had nothing to do with thirst. Bella kissed her, her mouth impossibly hot and soft against Alice’s lips and then, daringly, her tongue. Bella pulled back a millimeter and said against the cool expanse of Alice’s cheek, “You stupid little vampire. I love you so much.”

This revelation prompted, impossibly, the sensation of real heat in Alice, the sense that she was burning energy to create movement. But there was only one movement inside her. “Stop,” she whispered.

“Why?”

Then there was an accompanying surge of sadness, more powerful than the first. “Once I’ve had it, I don’t know if I can go without,” she said, nakedly vulnerable, with a dragging terror more powerful than she could have thought possible.

Alice felt Bella react to this confession, as if in each of her cells. Her heart accelerated past where it had already been. Her mouth fell open. Then, suddenly, she keeled forward and hugged Alice hard, pressing her face into Alice’s shoulder, wrapping her elegant arms around her. Bella’s hair fell in Alice’s face. “Don’t go without,” Bella said into her ear. “Never go without me, then.”

When she pulled back, Alice couldn’t hide the dubiousness of her hope from her face. Bella was human—she would grow up and tire of a pixie immortal with the face of a seventeen year old. Bella would go to college and read Butler and Baudrillard and date a butch named Mel. This was the natural order of things. Alice had been preparing herself for this eventuality without realizing it; now she confronted it fully. “Bella,” she said, trying and failing to conceal her emotion, “You’ll have to go on, and grow up, and leave me. I’ll always be this.”

Abruptly Bella was crying. Her face was wet on Alice’s; her chest shuddered. “I’ll grow up, and you’ll come too. We don’t have to be apart. I don’t _want _to be.”

It was fundamentally destabilizing to realize that Bella loved her with some of the vehemence that Alice loved her. She didn’t know what to do.

“Don’t think about that now, okay?” Bella’s hands covered Alice’s cheeks, holding her face still so she could look into her eyes. “Don’t think about it. Just—don’t leave yet, okay? Come upstairs.”

Alice would not take convincing. They devised a plan to sneak past Charlie—neither was ready to broach that issue—and soon Alice was back in the room she’d liked so much yesterday, picking leaves out of her hair.

Bella looked flustered. “I should get ready for bed. I need a—human minute.”

“Take as many as you like,” Alice said, and laid on the bed. She picked up a copy of _Wuthering Heights _and began, abstractly, to read.

Bella returned in a few minutes with wet hair and smelling of spearmint. She was dressed in simple cotton pajamas that were immensely appealing simply for the intimacy of seeing her wear them. She looked with uncertainty at Alice on the bed, as if she’d become shy. “Well?” Alice said, and opened her arms.

Bella crawled onto the bed and into her arms. The pose was more intimate than any they’d had before. “Hi,” Bella said, and kissed her.

“Don’t be absurd, Bella,” Alice said, and kissed her back.

“Close your eyes.”

“Am I going to like this?”

“Probably not. How many fingers am I going to be holding up?”

Alice smiled with her eyes closed. “You’re being absurd again. I don’t know.”

“You are not a very good psychic, did you know that?”

“Ask me whether I’m about to tackle you.”

The feeling of Bella’s chin in her shoulder—the rub of her shin against Alice’s pants—the mini-lantern string lights above them—the breath of spearmint and heat and fatigue—the wet hair making patterns on Alice’s sweater. It was too good. Nobody should be allowed to have it.

Bella said, “Who’s going to win the World Series?”

This one was easy. “The Cardinals, in five games.”

“Who’s gonna be the president in 2012? No, 2016.”

“You don’t want to know.”

“How many fingers am I going to be holding up in three seconds?”

“Three.”

“Wrong.” Alice opened her eyes. Bella was holding up two fingers.

“I used to be a very good psychic. Then I met you.”

Bella’s face fell for a moment. She was more insecure than she looked sometimes—Alice was learning this.

“Then I met you and realized seeing the future was 100 times less important than knowing what you ate for breakfast.”

“Oh.” Bella buried her face in the blanket for a moment, overwhelmed.

“I’ll always want to be near you, with you, Bella. As long as you want it too.”

Bella squeezed Alice as tight as she could, which wasn’t very tight. She was fragile and beautiful in Alice’s arms on the narrow twin bed. “I’ll always want it too,” she promised.

Alice didn’t believe her; she couldn’t allow herself to. But it was enough for now.

After a long time, Bella fell asleep in her arms, with a blanket carefully tucked between them. “For warmth, not for chastity,” Alice promised wryly.

“I hate chastity,” Bella said sleepily. “I love warmth. But I love bad psychics more.”

“Go to sleep, Bella.”

“No,” Bella said, and did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi at thegables.tumblr.com!


	21. Chapter Twenty-One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We MeTrIcUlAtE a LoT

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some age-appropriate and consensual teen sexuality in this one!

They heard Alice sneaking in about six, unmistakable for the sound of her platform Mary Janes on the smooth concrete floor. “Is that—” Edward said. His hair was mussed from Jasper’s hands and rubbing against the leg of Jasper’s jeans.

“I don’t doubt,” Jasper said, straightening a little.

“Did you know you have a drawl,” Edward mumbled, as if half asleep. Jasper felt proud that he’d so convincingly simulated sleep, and he felt embarrassed and _raw _to be heard like that.

“I lived in Texas for more than a hundred years, Edward. What else should I sound like?”

“You should sound quiet, so we can hear what she’s doing.”

Jasper’s fingers dug into Edward’s side, but as it happened this was not really effective as a deterrent. They both listened quietly. Alice was hurrying. “We should go after her,” Jasper said after a minute. “She’s just—”

“A teenage girl,” Edward finished for him, and got up, smiling. He extended his hand to help Jasper up, and Jasper seriously considered using the offered hand to pull him down, to not get up from their spot on the floor for several hours or days. But they were taking things slow—or not slow. Careful. They had a long time.

“I say it because it’s true. Come on, then.”

They opened Alice’s door without knocking, to find her finishing the task of changing her clothes, buttoning the top buttons of a plaid duster-length shirt dress she’d paired with white sneakers and her butterfly hair clips. “Hi boys,” she said, arch and unflappable. “I find it very endearing that you cannot be subtle about anything.”

“She knew,” Edward reported, hearing her thoughts.

“You only get intel once it becomes absolutely useless to me,” Jasper complained to his little sister.

“Well it worked out for you, so why are you complaining?” She went over to her dressing table and refreshed her lipstick.

Edward looked both horrified and immensely pleased. “Were you asking Alice if she saw me kissing—expressing feelings to you?” He demanded.

Jasper groaned. He was expending most of his energy preventing himself from touching Edward—at his hip, his shirt collar, the infinitely soft nape of his neck. Ugh. Once you were allowed to touch someone, it was impossible not to want it all the time. To the object of his desire he said without looking at him, “Well she didn’t know, so don’t worry, I was completely in the dark.”

“Al,” Edward said, who didn’t seem to actually want to embarrass Jasper, said, “Where’ve you been?”

“Three guesses.” She was putting a scarf into her bag, moving so quickly that it would have been difficult for a human to follow the action.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Jasper said, although he sort of did, “But did Bella—_know _you were there?”

She rolled her eyes with impressive force at him for such a tiny person. “I don’t lurk, Jazz, good grief. I’m not a lurker. I spent the night with her.”

Jasper put his hand up to stop Edward from an outburst already half underway. Edward closed his mouth. Then he said, more calmly, “You’re going back now.”

“Yes, I promised I wouldn’t leave. I just snuck out to change my clothes and get my things.”

They were both staring at her.

“Guys, oh my god. You _finally _smooch and you think you invented being gay, don’t you? There’s enough to go around. It’s one big gay happy family.”

Edward looked a little appalled; Jasper faked a cough to hide his laughter.

“I know you think it’s dangerous. But like I told her—I’m not dangerous to her. I don’t _want _to drink her blood. I’d never hurt her. I need you to trust me. Trust me like you’d want each other to trust you, okay?”

Edward and Jasper exchanged a glance. Jasper realized they had no real idea what they were to each other; the thought was like drowning. “Alright,” he said, and heard his own drawl; watched Edward hear it. It was less like drowning to learn that Edward had decidedly positive feelings about the sound of his accent.

“Oh, one more thing—I know Carlisle and Esme won’t be trouble, but warm Rosalie up, please. I want to bring her to the house today.” Alice bent to tie her shoes.

A spike of worry went through Jasper, too quickly to properly conceal it from entering the room’s emotional atmosphere. He looked at Edward, who was very carefully looking straight ahead, at nothing.

Jasper said, “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

Edward looked suddenly over at him; he must have been reading his thoughts. “It’s okay, Jazz,” he said quietly.

“Did it occur to you that maybe I’m being selfish?” Jasper was abruptly upset. “I’ve always been very interested in self preservation.”

Edward shook his head. “Alice,” he said, “Bring her if you want. I’ll talk to him.”

Alice must have thanked him silently, because she just nodded and ran fluidly down the corridor and down out of the house.

To Jasper’s surprise, Edward held him firmly by the shoulders, looking into his eyes. “You’re not afraid you’ll hurt Bella.”

This flooded him with shame. “Maybe I am.”

“Jasper.”

“I haven’t been training myself for a hundred years like you have. I don’t have the practice.”

Edward let out a choked humorless laugh. “I hadn’t been practicing with Bella Swan.”

“What, so if you can do it, I can do it? Is that the proposition?”

Unexpectedly, Edward caught him up in a hard, straight-on, ordinary hug, his chin pressed into Jasper’s taller shoulder. He just held him like that, around the waist, for a moment. It was a hug that held the promise of sex but far away from the present moment. Then finally Edward pulled back. “No, not exactly. You told me once that there were different kinds of temptation, and that some were more worth warding off than others. I gave in to my temptation to kiss you, to confess myself to you. So you can stave off this one.”

“That’s not fair,” Jasper said, but weakly. He knew he would do it. And anyway, Edward was kissing him now, his fingers in Jasper’s hair, and so he didn’t have much will to say anything else.

~~~

“You left,” Bella said when she opened her eyes.

Alice did a little twirl at the foot of the bed, displaying her outfit. “I couldn’t leave in the clothes I came in. What would the neighbors think?”

“You just wanted to show off your wardrobe.”

“Two things can be true, Bella.” Alice made a strange feline leap and landed weightlessly on the bed directly over Bella, her hands and knees on either side of Bella’s body. All of a sudden their faces were very close together. “And I wanted to catch Jasper and Edward all moony eyed at each other.”

“I’m gross,” Bella said, suddenly aware of her breath. “Wait _what_?”

“You’re the very opposite of gross. If I could ever find you gross do you think I would have any business in your bedroom?” Alice leaned to one side and curled up against Bella’s side in the narrow bed. Her fingertips stroked absently at Bella’s wrist. “I like girls, and therefore it would be very silly of me to find girls’ bodies gross.”

“Alright, alright, you’re very enlightened,” Bella said, still waking up. “Go back. What about Edward and Jasper?”

Alice gave an amused little sigh. “I couldn’t see it for the longest time. I could tell that Jasper wanted me to try to see, but I couldn’t, because Edward wouldn’t make up his mind. He must have done it right at the last minute.”

“Details, please, for the mortals in the room.”

“They’ve been obsessed with each other since Jasper and I first met the Cullens. But neither one could admit it. Jasper could hint. He’s dated men before. Edward couldn’t.”

Bella rolled over and rubbed her eyes, reframing everything she knew about Edward in her mind. This revelation both did and didn’t make sense. She felt intensely and irrationally happy for him, her fated enemy and morose occasional friend. “And when you went home to change, it was true?”

Alice kissed Bella’s shoulder and leapt out of the bed, landing on her feet. “I’m never wrong, Bella. Well, that’s not true. I’m wrong all the time. Tell me: will you come and meet my family today?”

Bella expressed her reservations. Alice expressed her reassurances and her vehemence. Predictably, she won. In the truck, which Alice grumbled about under her breath, Bella twisted her hands. “What if they hate me?”

“What if they hate you? Is that the question? Where’s _what if they eat me_?”

Bella reflected on this. “I don’t have a precedent for that kind of worry.”

Alice let out a short unhappy laugh. “If only you knew!”

They pulled up in front of the Cullen house, what Alice ironically called “the Cullen manse.” It was modern, all glass and clean lines, not at all what Bella had expected. Stupidly, it had not quite occurred to her that the Cullens were _rich_. She felt underdressed.

The inside of the house was even nicer than the outside—lots of low minimalist furniture and tasteful art. They found the Cullens in the kitchen. Carlisle and Esme were behind the counter, cooking with abstract aplomb. “Bella!” Esme cried. This was Alice’s mother. She was younger than Bella had been picturing, dressed in a linen wrap dress and barefoot. Her hair was what old-timey novels would have called _auburn _and fell in loose waves around her shoulders. “We are so honored to have you visiting, we’ve heard so much about you.”

Alice was both amused and tetchy at Bella’s side. “They’re very anxious to prove they’re open minded and down with the gays. It has been a fairly gay few days.”

“Alice—” Edward said from his place half-lurking against the far wall of the room. But he wasn’t really angry.

Suddenly bold, Bella went over to him. He was dressed in black and not a hair was out of place. She was impressed again by his handsomeness and the intensity of his eyes. He smiled, caught, at her. She knew he was trying once again to read her mind and failing. She found she liked this a great deal.

“You too, huh?” She said to him quietly, knowing the whole family could hear nevertheless.

“Gay? Entangled with a vampire? In over my head?” He said, smiling his crooked smile. “Me? You? Us? Not likely.”

She cracked a sudden laugh that surprised them both. “Hold your breath, I’m gonna hug you.”

He obliged, with only slight nerves. His body was as hard and good-smelling as Alice’s, but tall and without the intuitive curving shape of girlishness that Alice had. Bella felt deeply happy with her choice. 

When they broke away, she said, “Where’s your one?”

It clearly pleased and intimidated Edward to have Jasper indicated this way. “Hiding from you. Don’t take it personally, please. He’s just taking precautions.”

“But you’re not?” Alice said behind him, her voice rough with humor or irritation or both.

“I’m risking a family catchphrase here, but _Alice_—call off the dogs.” Carlisle came around the counter, drying his hands. “You’re very welcome, Bella. And of course you know we’ll do everything we can to keep you safe here. Jasper is not dangerous. He’s merely overcautious.”

“Oh, I know.” Bella felt overwhelmed by the beauty and elegance of all the people in the room with her. “I’m not afraid of some vegetarian vampires.”

This brazen disregard for their dangerousness made Esme, Carlisle, and Alice laugh. Edward smiled darkly.

“Did you hear that, Jazz?” Alice called, raising her voice slightly.

“He’s outside already,” Edward said. “He said he would be alright to meet us at the field.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Esme turned to take something from the stove. “Bella, could you eat? We so rarely get the chance to use the kitchen. We’ve been tinkering all morning, just for the fun of it.”

“I’m terrible at _chiffonade_,” Carlisle contributed, “Scalpel skills don’t transfer, apparently.”

Bella had already eaten lunch, but she would not have admitted this under pain of death. Alice twitched, clearly not wanting to force Bella to eat more than she wanted to, but she said nothing. “I’d love to try your tinkering,” Bella said. “It smells delicious.”

As she was presented with the plate, which did indeed smell good (“I have no instincts,” Esme warned, “I only followed the recipe very carefully”) she heard Alice hiss to Edward, “Where are they?”

“Sulking and accompanying sulking,” he whispered back. “Be patient.”

“I asked her specifically.”

“In baseball we trust, Alice.” Then Edward left the room, presumably to go in search of Jasper.

Bella ate the food her vampire girlfriend’s parents had prepared for her. It tasted good but was somehow slightly off, prepared by direction rather than instinct. She did not admit this either. After she’d made conversation with Carlisle and Esme and finished her food, she followed Alice on a tour of the house. Last of all was Alice’s bedroom, on the second floor. It was a little larger than Bella’s own room, and to Bella’s surprise, it had a bed. “What do you do in it?” She asked.

Alice arched an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Bella turned to the bookshelf to hide her blush. It was full of books organized by color, in a rainbow pattern, which Bella personally thought was absolute anarchy. How would you ever find anything? The bookshelf also held large crystals and seashells and pinecones. There was a large piece of embroidery artwork hung on the wall. An antique wardrobe sat in one corner. Bella didn’t need to open it to know it would be full of couture. But the element of the room that interested Bella most was against the far wall. It was a bay window cut into the wall, jutting out of the back of the house. There was a window seat, plush with pillows. The view out the window was of the creek running behind the house and then the endless forest beyond it, all the way to the mountains. “Wow,” Bella breathed. 

“You can come and sit and read any time you like,” Alice said, suddenly at her side. “Do you like it?”

“I love this house.”

“I like seeing you in it.” With casual grace Alice raked her hair back over the top of her head. “They love you, you know.”

“Not your sister, I take it.”

“Don’t worry about Rosalie for now. There’s time.” Bella thought this would be difficult to manage until Alice drew even closer to her. “Showing you all this is even better than I thought it would be. I like not having secrets from you.”

Bella didn’t reply, just slid her hand along the smooth shape of Alice’s waist, and dipped her head down to kiss her.

Alice’s cool, marble-smooth hands came up to cup Bella’s face, and then drifted down again and slotted themselves into the back pockets of Bella’s jeans. The results, for both of them, were instantaneous. This was a different kind of kiss. Bella gasped slightly and tugged at Alice’s waist until they were pulled firmly against each other. Alice tilted her head and opened her mouth, inviting Bella’s tongue, and repressed a moan when she received it. The kiss deepened and Bella’s heartbeat was so loud between them that it created the sensation of two hearts pounding, playing against each other. Alice had no need for air but her breaths were coming ragged and uneven. Confident at this result, Bella used her hand to firmly tilt up Alice’s chin and kiss down the length of her white throat, nipping a little, experimentally, and down into the V of her sternum, only stopping when impeded by the buttons of her dress. “Bella—” Alice stuttered.

“What?” Bella said into the smooth skin of her neck.

“God_damn _you,” Alice said, and forced them apart with great difficulty. This bothered Bella until she realized that Alice was just going to close the door of the room. She came back half-growling, “You make everything difficult,” and then her hands were on Bella’s ass again, tugging her close, and Bella’s mouth was hot against hers.

“Can they hear?” Bella asked after a moment.

“Yes—no—I don’t care.” Alice was panting. “They’re probably all hiding outside.”

“Good,” Bella said, and began to unbutton Alice’s dress. Just enough to get her mouth inside, where she wanted it. “Is this okay?” She asked, her lips already dipping below Alice’s collarbone.

“Jesus, _yes._”

They were still standing up in the middle of the bedroom with its bed that was not for sleeping. Bella might have had her purse over her arm, she wasn’t sure. She had not planned to take anyone’s clothes off today.

Alice wasn’t wearing a bra. Bella unbuttoned the dress to the waist and pulled it back over her shoulders a little. Her breasts were small and round and perfect. Bella lowered her head and flicked her tongue over Alice’s nipple. Alice gave a hiss of arousal, her hips bucking into Bella’s thigh a little.

“Hold still,” Bella said, but her voice was thready too.

“I can’t if you’re going to do—_that_.”

Bella felt powerful and a little diabolical. She closed her lips over Alice’s nipple and sucked.

“_Fuck_,” Alice gasped with whispered intensity.

Bella was too busy to reply. But Alice’s hands were firm and persuasive on her waist and the small of her back, her breaths not even cold anymore in her ear, and she was distracted too.

By the time they’d collapsed on the bed, breathing hard, they were both topless to the waist and overcome with arousal, lips wet and swollen and hair thoroughly mussed. It was not the fullest or most immediate consummation any couple had ever had. But it was their first one, and it shaken both of their small physical and metaphysical worlds.

“Oh no,” Alice said into Bella’s hair, laughing a little, overcome, “Oh no.”

Bella knew just what she meant.

They were quiet for a long minute, drawing patterns with fingertips on shoulders and jawbones. Finally Alice raised up on one elbow and said, “I hate to ask you this, but: how do you feel about America’s pastime?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Say hi at thegables.tumblr.com. Thanks for your comments and questions, I love them!


	22. Chapter Twenty-Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jasper rose in two elegant movements and said quietly, “That right fielder plays dirty,” with eyes only for Edward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't need to tell you to put Supermassive Black Hole on repeat, do I? 
> 
> #riporiginalvictoria

Edward found Jasper just where he had 24 hours earlier—on the veranda overlooking the creek. This time Jasper, looking considerably less pensive, was reading a book, his beautiful shock of dark blond hair half-covering one eye. “Hi,” he said, with such tentative and leavened affection that it gave Edward a jolt to the heart. “How did it go? Oh god—you smell like her.”

Without his permission Edward’s hand followed the fall of Jasper’s hair down to his neck and then continued to his shoulder blade. “She hugged me,” he admitted. “We bonded, apparently, over our gay revelations.”

Jasper had difficulty concealing how much this pleased him. It was on his face as well as in his thoughts. “Did Rosalie show?”

“No, all Hales were in absentia. Is the smell too bad?”

Jasper got up and straightened the hem of Edward’s shirt from imperceptible crookedness. “No, of course not. It’s just strange to have a human’s scent out here. Don’t worry, Ted, I’ll be fine. I’m following your impressive example. I’m focusing on the good kind of willpower.”

Edward wanted to dwell on what this kind of focus would allow for other lapses in willpower, and if he could exploit them at some later hour, but something central to his nature prevented him from following this line of conversation. “I thought baseball—something outside and distant—”

Jasper stopped him with a hand on his cheek. “I know, it’s alright. I want to do it. We’ve got to support Alice. And from all reports Bella is a very nice girl.” He moved to go back to the house. “Let’s get changed, shall we?”

“_Nice!_” Edward rasped. “Nice isn’t the word I’d use. Formidable, insolent, disruptive, is more like it.”

“You like her.”

Edward would probably die for Bella Swan, for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. “She’s nearly ruined my life countless times.”

“You know what you two are?” Jasper gestured Edward ahead of him up the stairs. “We used to use this word all the time. You’re colleagues. Something like that.”

“You’re _not _my colleague.”

“No, I am not. My bat is in your room, please bring it.”

“I will. So—_Ted_—is still happening, is it?”

“I’ll see you in fifteen minutes, Edward!”

When they met the rest of the family in front of the house, Edward tried not to make eye contact with Alice. He knew, unavoidably, from her thoughts what she and Bella had been up to, and he wanted desperately to leave her her privacy. She had the good sense to count backwards from 1000 by sevens in her head.

“I’m sorry we didn’t meet before,” Jasper said to Bella. “I’m Jasper.”

Edward could not read Bella’s thoughts but he could see from her expression that Jasper, with his stature, good looks, and glinting scars, impressed her. “Oh, that’s okay. Bella.”

Rosalie and Emmett did come down after all, and introduced themselves, Emmett with exuberant fondness, as if he already knew her, and Rosalie with clipped politeness, worse than cruelty.

“What do you know about baseball, Bella?” Jasper turned slightly to find Edward in his peripheral vision—just looking for him, locating him in the scene. It gave Edward a sudden and traitorous little surge of arousal.

“Absolutely nothing.”

Jasper laughed, casual and friendly, with none of the intensity he usually directed toward Edward. “That’s perfect. Alice will love the chance to teach you.”

“Shut it, Jazz,” Alice retorted, but as they started the drive to the baseball field, she was already explaining the difference between two and four seam fastballs.

At the field, they heard the first peal of thunder. Alice, who had no doubt seen it coming, said with gloomy delight, “It’s time.”

“One of Alice’s specialties is weather,” Edward said to Bella.

“Is that right?” She said wryly with an irony that he did not understand.

“My specialty is seducing impertinent human girls,” Alice said without looking at her.

Esme, tucking her long hair into her baseball cap, said, “Don’t listen to her, Bella. Will you help me umpire?”

They all took their positions in the field: Alice on the mound, Edward and Emmett fielding from a great distance. Carlisle, Rosalie, and Jasper took their turns at the bat. Edward could tell that Alice was unconsciously trying to show off: it wasn’t quite present in her thoughts, but she stared down her batters with intensity, then gave an exaggerated wind-up that culminated in a ballerina kick in the air and an elegant forward fold over her delivery. As always, she threw strikes. One of Emmett’s first compliments about Alice had concerned the ruthlessness of her slider.

Jasper’s turn to bat came third; he hit an absolutely towering fly ball that seemed easily catchable until it got caught in a century-old Sitka spruce. Edward could hear the cheers of congratulations from Carlisle and Rosalie. Jasper was jogging around the bases, assuming an easy home run, when Edward started to scale the tree. He located in the ball in a number of seconds, leapt down, and starting sprinting for home plate. Jasper was just rounding second base when he realized. He gave a little yelp of alarm and delight, and started running too. They met in a spectacular collision at home plate, Edward actually underneath Jasper, splayed out on the flat rock they always used for their plate. The rock broke into many pieces. Jasper’s elbows were in Edward’s ribs and the brim of his cap was cutting off Edward’s trachea. Jasper gave a little _oof _as Edward’s knee accidentally knocked him slightly in the groin. Both of them were covered in mud.

“Sorry,” Edward said. His heart was racing. The ball was clenched in his hand, half-crushed. “Esme?”

“Jasper, my darling, you are out,” she said regretfully, with only a tinge of irony, and Rosalie groaned in frustration behind him. Alice and Emmett whooped.

Jasper rose in two elegant movements and said quietly, “That right fielder plays dirty,” with eyes only for Edward, carefully keeping the smirk off his face.

Bella watched everything with keen awareness and fascination, but she watched Alice most.

So she noticed first when Alice’s eyes went faraway and the baseball fell out of her hand. Edward, aware of her thoughts, got there next. “Someone’s coming,” Alice muttered, her eyes fixed on nothing. “I couldn’t see until just now—.”

If Edward concentrated he could hear the edges of their thoughts now. Three vampires. Everyone was surrounding Alice on the mound now.

“Who are they, Alice?” Carlisle asked, but it was half-lost in the clamor of everyone talking and asking questions.

“I don’t _know, _hold on hold on,” she said, biting her lip. She looked immensely young and very overwhelmed. Edward knew that her thoughts were divided between the vision and Bella. 

“Nomads,” he said as the thoughts crystallized. “Not like us.” His eyes flashed to Jasper and knew that he was working furiously to extend a degree of calm and rationality over the scene.

“Bella,” Alice said, her voice cold and dead, “Take your hair down, please.”

Rosalie was thinking that such a small gesture was pointless, but she didn’t say it.

Carlisle assumed his most paternal and professional authority. “Everyone needs to tread carefully,” he said in a low voice. “Don’t make quick assumptions or quick gestures.”

“Carlisle, I need to get her out of here, please,” Alice begged. Edward knew only Jasper’s projected aura was keeping her from panic.

“There’s no time now. It’ll be alright, Alice, we’re just having a conversation.”

Edward knew Carlisle didn’t believe this, and so he didn’t meet his eyes. He focused his attention on gathering the thoughts of the approaching menace. He could tell that the supposed leader was not a threat—it was his colleague, an irritating and ruthless sort of person. A tracker. He would dissect their relationships and look for weaknesses. “Alice,” Edward said, with unusual force, “Do you trust me?”

_Almost never_, she generally would have cracked. Now, her face drawn and white, she said, “Yes.”

“You need to not act too protective over Bella. No matter what happens. Don’t pique their interest. Bella is incidental. Okay?”

Alice’s eyes flicked over to Bella, who was standing close to Esme, her hair loosed over her shoulders. There was something in Alice’s eyes already filled with grief, a premonitory cold awfulness. Edward’s stomach tightened. “Alright,” she said, without looking at him.

Moments later, the nomads arrived in the clearing. They were dressed in the clothes of the dead.

~~~

When it became clear that the situation had devolved—had gone from awkward to deadly to internationally dangerous—it was Bella who had the clearest course of action. She kept saying to Alice, “You have to take me to Charlie.”

Emmett, Carlisle, and Edward were discussing possibilities in low voices. Alice was near-catatonic, or so it seemed, but Jasper knew she was trying to use the tracker’s future to get to Bella’s, groping for a disaster that hadn’t yet begun but had been decided upon. Jasper himself was working with exhausting energy to manage the emotional environment of his family. Focusing them into clarity and calm like focusing the sun through a magnifying glass. He knew when he could relax this focus he would be fuzzy and drained. Edward looked over his shoulder every 30 seconds at him, as if to reassure himself that Jasper was still there, and this was keeping him anchored in the world.

Finally Bella convinced Alice to take her home, to sway the trail from Charlie. The rest of the Cullens went home to prepare for a chase.

There was changing of clothes and fueling of cars, a million very brief cell phone calls. All Jasper wanted was to be alone with Edward for a moment; he had the suspicion they would be separated. At one point he got caught in the kitchen with Rosalie, who was unwillingly charging the family’s phones and putting new laces on a pair of Emmett’s tattered boots. There would be a long hunt. She was still dressed in a raglan T-shirt and baseball pants and cleats, her golden hair in impressive criss-crossed French braids. “You’re not being very tactical,” she said to him, “You’re not getting into the fray.”

“I gave up my tactical work a long time ago, Rosalie.”

“We all had, until _she _came into our lives.”

Jasper stared at her, thinking of Alice’s life-changing love, thinking of a vision that had propelled her through her first harrowing months as a vampire. Thinking of Edward’s love and camaraderie with a person who had nearly ruined his temperance. Bella had animated and restructured and enlivened the family for longer than they had known her. Bella had created possibilities. “I never want to hear you say that again,” he said, with deep and gravelly authority. “I absolutely will not countenance you saying anything against that girl again. Not for Alice. Not for me. Because it’s wrong.”

Rosalie’s eyes were wide. She was embarrassed. She didn’t speak, but then she didn’t have to. Jasper went up the stairs without saying anything more.

When he came down again, minutes later, he found the rest of his family, except Alice, in the kitchen now. They greeted him with sober, almost apologetic, expressions. Edward wouldn’t look at him. “Jasper,” Carlisle said, “We want you to go with Alice and Bella to Phoenix. They’re coming back to the house now. They’ll need an additional companion, and your experience and expertise will be valuable. And you can keep them calm.”

Jasper didn’t immediately reply.

“I don’t want to ask you to do this,” Carlisle said, which meant that he was.

Edward was looking down at his hands.

Jasper said, “I understand. I can do it.”

“Esme and Rosalie will stay here to protect Bella’s father. Edward, Emmett, and I will follow the tracker.”

This was what Jasper had expected, somehow. He felt his ancient training kicking in, his ability to channel emotion into a task. But more powerfully he felt the atrophy of that training, the death of his ruthlessness. His interest in tactical work and in war had died with his racism. He had been naked and content without them for 100 years. But he felt the nakedness more now, the vulnerability of no longer being hardened by violence and bigotry. His feelings were a liability. He found himself memorizing the coastal contours of Edward’s hairline, uneven at the top of his neck. Imagining that neck being ripped asunder by a bored and chaotic vampire tracker.

“Alright,” he said. “I understand.”

“Thank you,” Carlisle said. “They’ll be here in fifteen minutes.” He handed out tasks to the rest of them, conspicuously leaving Edward and Jasper out, just saying, “Be ready to leave, please.”

Tacitly, without needing to talk about it, Jasper and Edward went up the stairs together to Edward’s room. Jasper had always loved his room. There was a low suede couch on one wall, and the other long wall was covered with music, CDs and records on orderly shelves. He had an excellent but not flashy sound system and a big bookshelf of novels and philosophy. There was an antique Persian rug on the floor that was softer than it looked, Jasper knew from experience. On the walls were black and white photographs of Yosemite and Moab. The room was always very neat and always soundtracked by low, soothing music. It was the interior design version of Jasper’s power to soothe. His own room, by contrast, was a hodgepodge of items, many of them given to him by Alice, which he didn’t have the heart to turn down.

Once they were alone and the door closed, both their poker faces evaporated very quickly. Edward pressed his face into Jasper’s shoulder, his eyelashes snagged in Jasper’s hair. Jasper’s arms came up to hold him around the shoulders, one hand caressing the back of his neck. _Memorize this: the shape and the feeling_. “It’s the least we can do,” Edward said into Jasper’s T-shirt. The shape and pressure of his lips was very evident even through the cotton. “If we want to talk about protecting life.”

“I know.” His hands rubbed absently up and down Edward’s back. “I’m ready and willing.”

“I know.”

“It’s just that I want to protect your life, too.”

Edward looked up, a little perplexed, a little in love. “It’s not mine that’s in danger. I’ll be fine.”

“Most likely, yes.” Jasper’s face was serious.

Edward put his hand on Jasper’s face, held his cheek and jaw softly in his palm. “I’ll be fine. So will you. You’ll protect Alice and Bella. On the side of good. That’s us, right?”

Jasper let out a shuddery breath. “We’ll be together again soon.”

“Of course.” But Jasper could feel his fear, on a hundred different counts.

“You’re following him north?”

“To start, yes.”

“Alright. Don’t take unnecessary risks, please.” Jasper picked idly at the belt loop on Edward’s baseball pants. Not a sexual gesture, just a possessive one. _God_, three hours ago he’d been worried only about how to broach the subject of sex. Now they were parting.

“You too.” Edward kissed his jaw and his mouth.

“Edward.” Jasper gently dug his fingers into the small of Edward’s back, massaging slowly. He felt fragile and vulnerable and very sure. “I know it’s too soon to be going on about it. I don’t care. I love you.”

Edward smiled, as if at the inadequacy of this sentiment, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “You are my life now,” he said simply. He kissed Jasper once more and let himself be kissed, a bruising and desperate thing, pushed backwards against the sofa, but only for a moment. Then they straightened up, adjusted their clothes, and went down to assume their tasks.

~~~

Alice’s nerves lay in tatters, but she managed to do the first good thing she’d done all day: fabricate a lie. “Charlie is going to forgive you, Bella.”

“You can’t know that.”

The lie was this: “Yes, I do. I can see his future just fine. He’ll forgive you. It’ll be like it never happened.” Alice spent the last of her equanimity selling this statement. Bella seemed to accept it. She was in the passenger seat of the off-road jeep, tears streaking her face, her hair chaotic from wind and fear, her lips white. Alice felt like she was watching the fruit of her selfishness. They were pulling into the Cullens’ driveway.

“We’ll go to Phoenix,” Bella said for the fifth time with new resolve. “He won’t think to look there.”

“Yes. Phoenix. They’re going to want to send Jasper with us.” Alice could see him driving the Mercedes, if she concentrated on the front seat.

“Jasper?”

“For help. And calm.” They got out of the car, weak-kneed.

Suddenly Bella was beside her, her hand tight around Alice’s wrist. “Where are you?” She asked, peering into Alice’s eyes. “Where are you looking?”

Being asked a question so gentle and intimate and _private _made Alice feel exhausted. But also very known. She brought up her hand to cuff the back of her neck sheepishly. “Traffic patterns on I-5. Accidents and construction. Alternate routes.”

This was clearly not what Bella had expected to hear. Quickly, she pitched forward to land a kiss on Alice’s cheek. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll find Carlisle. You look at the road.”

Shimmery harsh lines of guilt went through Alice’s whole body. _Is this what nerve pain is like? Did I used to know this? _She had reduced this girl, a force for good and for rationality and deductive reasoning and for slow, indulgent make-outs, into prey. She could not be forgiven for this.

As she walked behind Alice up to the house, she met Jasper on the front steps. He was no longer wearing his baseball clothes, just a black hoodie and jeans, an overnight bag on one arm. She looked way, way up at him—her first vampire friend, the person who had introduced her to this world. She felt the little throb of peace he pushed through the air at her, but they both knew it was insufficient. Jasper himself did not look up to any big pep talks or reassurance. She felt suddenly sick to realize she was separating him from Edward a day after their consummation. But he said, with faux solidness in his voice, “We’re gonna fix this, okay? You and me.”

She catapulted herself into his chest and gave a little whimper. What she wouldn’t give to cry.

Half an hour later they were in the Mercedes, driving south.

~~~

Jasper drove; Alice and Bella sat in the backseat. Bella watched the forest end. She was awake until Portland. She said she wouldn’t be able to sleep, and Jasper, eyes golden in the rearview mirror, said politely, “Would you like to?”

“Do you have that power?” She yawned. She was wearing Esme’s clothes, and Esme hers, to disguise the scent. She looked slightly comical in Esme’s cashmere sweater with a ruffled hem, the sleeves too long for her, and white jeans.

Jasper frowned. “I’m not sure. I haven’t had extensive contact with humans in a really long time.”

Bella stretched, slow and tired, and then laid her head in Alice’s lap. Alice hastily found a blanket they’d packed to be her pillow. “Makes sense,” Bella said. “But let’s give it a try. I won’t hold it against you if you fail.”

He didn’t fail, of course. Bella slept on in Alice’s lap as they curved east through Oregon and descended into Nevada. Alice traced the edges of Bella’s wispy baby hairs in front of her ear and over her forehead, warm and soft with her sleep. When Alice was sure she was in deep sleep, she asked Jasper softly, “Does it tire you out to influence people like this?”

“Vampires don’t get tired.”

“Different kinds of tired, Jazz.”

He sighed a little and smiled in the rearview at her. “Does it tire you out to have a vision?”

She thought about it. “Not physically, not that kind of tired. But it can be overwhelming. Especially trying to be present in the moment at the same time. It’s like time-traveler tired. Jet lag.”

“Interesting.” He executed a complicated freeway change while Alice looked out the window. Then he said, “Yes, it does tire me out a little. On Bella a little more than usual. I’m not sure if it’s because she’s human or because she’s so…”

“Hardheaded,” Alice supplied.

He smirked. “Impervious. Supernaturally guarded. I have to focus on my influence over her. But I’m glad she can sleep.”

“You shouldn’t have to be here. I—feel terrible. You should be with Edward on Fire Island or something right now. Not fleeing a murderer to _Phoenix_.”

Jasper gave a surprised but muffled laugh. “What gave you the sense that Edward is ready for Fire Island? Or that I am?” Despite everything, it gave Jasper evident pleasure to say Edward’s name, to have it linked with his own.

“You know what I mean.”

They were quiet for a moment, and then he said, “It’s true that I will miss him. But Alice—I know you feel a great deal of guilt for what has happened. But you absolutely can’t blame yourself. Or worry about me. It’s an absurd, absolutely unlikely circumstance.”

Alice made a low noncommittal sound.

“Think of it in this way, if you like. If you’d never seen a vision of Bella, you’d never have met me. We wouldn’t have gone to Alaska. I wouldn’t have met Edward in the first place. And we’ll be together again. So there’s that.”

She had to consider this. “That’s true.”

“There’s two possible routes here. Do you see any accidents?”

Suddenly she remembered they were fleeing. She scanned the roads ahead. “No, both are fine. The eastern route has less traffic.”

Jasper took it. They arrived in Phoenix as the next night fell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Come say hi at thegables.tumblr.com. If you ask me a question about this story in the comments, you will probably get a long and overanalytical reply, if that's your thing!
> 
> Also I just wrote my second-ever fic on this site, a long one-shot about Gregory Lestrade and Mycroft Holmes? Lmao why. I do not know. But if you like my writing about gay longing and fraught glances go check it out!


	23. Chapter Twenty-Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her cheek rested on Bella’s thigh—cool to the touch and marble-smooth. She let out a cool, floral-scented breath and closed her eyes. This is as close as I’m going to get, Bella thought, this is as close as I’m going to get before I could die. She traced the arc of Alice’s ear with her fingertip, making her shiver slightly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please cancel me for the bizarre Jack Gilbert reference in this. What a relief, to be cancelled. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!

Bella had told Alice about Phoenix, often and at length. At lunch, in the little Volvo, in the truck, in Bella’s narrow bed with all the string lights lit. She’d described the clean, hard clarity of the heat, the power of the sun, the endless sprawl of the streets. The Thai and Mexican restaurants near her house, the sound of the Diamondbacks’ stadium roof extending to make one giant air-conditioned room.

She had not imagined that Alice would see Phoenix, especially like this. They had been driving, stopping only for gas and for Bella to use the bathroom, for nearly 30 hours. Night was coming in Phoenix, but twilight was very brief. For ten minutes or so the sun at the edge of the horizon made everything glow. Then it was gone. Alice went to check the three of them into the hotel under the cover of nightfall, Jasper staying with Bella as bodyguard, but Bella found she couldn’t be separated. “Please—” she said, embarrassed. “Can Jasper go?”

Alice studied her face and said, “Alright.” They stayed in the car while Jasper went inside, his stature and imposing looks quite bizarre against the backdrop of a La Quinta Inn. It was the first time the two of them had been alone since they’d been dressing to play baseball in Alice’s bedroom.

Alice was still wearing those clothes, and Bella had seen her put them on. She’d been laying on Alice’s bed, still topless herself, heart racing and underwear ruined with what they’d just tried. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, she’d just learned, like the combination of power and tenderness that occurs when you have your lips, your teeth, around another girl’s nipple. Every flick, every bite, sent shockwaves through Alice, who was trying not to gasp and failing. It sent currents of arousal through Bella every time she heard that. This girl who had no blood in her veins, who was _made of other things_, who could not die or eat pizza or sleep, who was magic, and she was coming apart in Bella’s arms. That was what power was. Authority tempered with gentleness.

Moments later, Alice had done the same thing to Bella, stripping her impatiently of her denim button-up and white T-shirt and thin heather gray sports bra. In a movement that made something _throb _between Bella’s legs, Alice put up her fingers to Bella’s lips, silently waited for her to breathe on them—possibly to suck them—to warm them up. Bella, realizing what she wanted, complied. Then Alice applied her tepid fingertips, slick from Bella’s own mouth, to her nipple, twisting and squeezing and pressing. It turned out that power was just being able to withstand something so arousing without your knees giving in.

Bella’s knees did not give in.

But she remained tempted as she laid sprawled out on the redundant bed, watching Alice get dressed to _play sports_. She had already been relieved, courtesy of Bella herself, of the odd long dress she’d been wearing, so she was standing there in her underwear, a pair of bikini-cut briefs made entirely of gray lace, a garment that left Bella in absolutely no doubt about her own sexuality. She had never touched another girls’ underwear before but she felt very sure that she wanted to remove them now. Regretfully, Alice was now covering them with a pair of baseball pants, which were snug over her ass and thighs, and baggier over her dainty calves. She tugged them up to the knee and drew up a pair of knee-socks underneath. _You’re done getting dressed, _Bella wanted to tell her, _that’s enough_, seeing her stand there topless in baseball pants and socks. But she felt suddenly shy. Alice had put on a pointless little sports bra, black, that dipped temptingly between her breasts. Then a tight long-sleeved T-shirt, also black. Then a baseball jersey, shrouding her figure, over that. There was a hat, but she placed it jauntily on Bella’s hat instead. “What?” She’d said.

“I think I’m a baseball fan,” Bella had said breathlessly, and Alice had laughed and kissed her and scolded her to get dressed.

That had been less than 48 hours ago. Now they were in Bella’s hometown, running from death. Alice was wearing the same clothes and Bella was wearing her mother’s. She was trying not to shake too much.

It was their first moment alone. Alice drew Bella to her chest, holding her head, touching her air, and Bella breathed deep and slow, focusing on Alice’s scent. “I just want to stay close to you,” she murmured apologetically. “I feel better if I can touch you. I know—that’s inconvenient.” _Needy_.

Alice made a harsh, dismissive sound in her throat. “You are not the inconvenient person in this scenario. I want to be close to you too.”

Bella didn’t reply, just memorized the feeling of Alice’s collarbone under her cheek.

“What human needs am I forgetting? Do you need to eat?”

“Eventually.”

“Bella—” Alice’s voice was thick and unfamiliar. “I’m so sorry.”

Bella’s fingers came up to cover her lips, a terrible reversal of that incredible arousing moment from a day and half before. “Stop,” she said. “Don’t apologize. Not your fault.”

She knew Alice didn’t believe this. They didn’t have time to talk further because Jasper was coming back to the car, tall and serious, with a packet of room keys in his hand. “There’s a parking spot right by the room,” he said, ducking his head inside. “We can minimize our time outside.”

The room was possibly the most depressing place Bella had ever been. Everything taupe-colored and cheap and too clean. Alice was mindlessly going through the clothes Bella had stuffed frantically in her duffle while breaking her father’s heart. She was folding them with the precision and dead eyes of a boutique girl on the upper east side, laying the T-shirts and pajamas in tidy stacks. Jasper was studying a map of Phoenix and checking his phone every two minutes.

Despite Alice’s distracting qualities, Bella had been watching him on the baseball field— Edward too. Alice had told her finally that they’d decided to make a go of it, that Edward had finally admitted he wanted to. Their attraction had been tangible out there on the field—all badly hidden glances, sometimes stares, and too-wide smiles. It made Bella absurdly happy to see Edward, her gloomy un-friend, so electrified. It explained a lot about him. And Jasper, whose powers she now understood, would have a good try at the gloom, learn to soften it. It seemed he already had.

Bella’s presence on that field had now torn them apart. Edward was in northern Washington, possibly Canada, chasing a murderous vampire, putting himself in harm’s way. Jasper was in a La Quinta Inn with her.

There was a fair bit of discussion about strategy and safety, where James probably was by now, whether he could have followed them. After a few hours Jasper left to pick up food for Bella while she and Alice stayed in the room. In his absence, they entangled in each other on the bed, not kissing, just touching. Alice had been careful to stay near her throughout, a hand on her hair or a knee half in her lap, but she was not present in any true sense. She did not speak much, and sometimes did not answer questions or even seem to hear them. She was scanning a thousand possible futures a minute, watching them change as people made decisions.

When Jasper came back with a bag of tacos, he sat carefully on the other side of the room. But Alice’s eyes were dull and Bella felt like she was alone in the room with him. This didn’t faze her. She knew that people as committed to human life as Carlisle and Edward would not have sent Jasper if he couldn’t be trusted with her.

She did, however, sort of think he hated her, for being the cause of all this. She maintained this theory until he said, while she ate her tacos without relish, “It’s weird, isn’t it?”

He jerked his chin at Alice.

“I can hear you, Jazz, I’m not catatonic.”

“S’alright,” he said, his drawl creeping in, “Just teasing. You’re working. Don’t mean to bother you.”

She rolled her eyes but then directed them to the invisible future again.

Bella wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. “It is weird,” she agreed with a placating glance at her girlfriend. “Usually I don’t see too much of it because she can’t—with me, you know. I put a damper on things.”

Jasper smiled a little. In certain lights you could see that he had a scar—the teethmarks of a warring vampire, Alice had whispered to her—that shimmered at the side of his neck, underneath his jaw. His arms were freckled with these marks too, but there was something both menacing and entrancing about this particular scar. A mark of tenderness gone so wrong that it’d been turned to iridescent stone.

“You don’t put a damper on my skill, for whatever reason,” he said. “Got a theory?”

Bella thought about this. “Maybe there’s something to do with trying too hard. You never really cared; Edward and Alice wanted to so bad.”

Jasper smirked. “So much of this life is about wanting things too bad. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Alice gave a sharp little intake of breath, as if surprised, and Bella’s pulse skyrocketed. “Alice? What is it?”

Alice didn’t reply, just frowned vaguely and mumbled under her breath.

“It might not mean anything,” Jasper said. “Sometimes she does that.”

Bella watched the world splay and snarl across Alice’s face. “Canyons,” she muttered, without really returning to the room.

“Hopefully more time will help. Things clear up, threads consolidate. Don’t worry too much, Bella. Try not too much.”

“You’re worried,” Bella accused. “You don’t have to tell me not to be.”

Jasper gave a caught and exasperated little look at her. “The inverse of being able to influence emotions,” he said. “Mine turn out too tangible sometimes.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Bella collected the debris of onion and cilantro in the paper the tacos had been wrapped in. “Bella,” he said finally. “Forgive me for getting too serious. The fact that all this is happening? Any of it? It’s happening not because there’s something vulnerable in you. It’s something rotten in us. Don’t misplace that.”

This proclamation offended Bella somehow. Alice, she felt certain, was not rotten, and she didn’t think the rest of the Cullens were either. She looked at Alice, whose lashes were low on her cheeks, who had driven south down the spine of the continent to protect her. Suddenly, with a rush of affection, she got up and went to sit next to her on the rough bedspread. Alice blinked and came to the surface. “I’ve done all I can,” she said, “there’s nothing new for now.” But her eyes flicked up to Jasper, communicating something low and unpleasant.

“What’s the last thing you saw?”

“They won’t catch him up there—at least right away,” she amended. “He’s going to head south. But we don’t know how far south.”

Jasper nodded, grave.

Alice looked shattered, exhausted and distant from the effort of scanning so many possibilities. “Just rest for a minute, okay?” Bella said.

Alice blinked slowly at her. “I’m not tired, Bella. I can’t get tired.”

Bella studied her dark eyes, not yet black but on their way. She’d been wearing makeup on the field, which had long since been smudged off. Her baseball outfit was dissembled, the jersey unbuttoned and the pants sliding down her shins. It was awful to see this crisis Bella had caused cast over Alice’s supposedly impervious body. “I don’t think that’s true,” Bella said. “I’m the human. I’ll be the expert on tired.”

Alice surveyed her face and evidently found some need in it. “What can I do?”

Bella didn’t want to say it in front of Jasper. She longed for privacy, longed for her purple bedroom in Forks, with a ferventness she would have once thought impossible. But another look at Alice’s face, white and concerned, made the decision for her. “Just—put your head in my lap, okay?”

Alice looked confused, but she did as Bella asked. Her cheek rested on Bella’s thigh—cool to the touch and marble-smooth. She let out a cool, floral-scented breath and closed her eyes. _This is as close as I’m going to get_, Bella thought, _this is as close as I’m going to get before I could die. _She traced the arc of Alice’s ear with her fingertip, making her shiver slightly.

Alice shifted so that she could look up at her, an eye contact that carried a multitude of things in it—not only worry and affection and reassurance but desire too, and promises. Then her eyes slipped closed. “I say moon is horses in the tempered dark, because horse is the closest I can get to it,” she said, her voice soft.

“What?”

“That one’s not Mary Oliver. It’s Jack Gilbert.”

“What does it mean?”

Alice huffed. “I don’t know.” She rolled so that she was on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, her chin on Bella’s leg. “Horse is the closest I can get to it.”

“To what, though?”

Alice shrugged as she peered up. “To what? Name it.”

Suddenly Jasper’s phone, which had not left his person in 36 hours, began to ring. Alice sat bolt upright with a compact, impossible movement. Bella was reminded that she was not in the company of humans. Jasper answered the phone, “Edward?”

Edward, on the other side of the phone and the Canadian border, spoke.

Jasper was getting up, finding his room key. “Slow down, slow down, it’s alright,” he said. He slipped out of the room and was gone.

By the time he came back, only a few minutes later, Alice was already having the vision.


	24. Chapter Twenty-Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Do you want to know what I'm wearing?"

When the phone leapt in his hand, a surge of pure energy went through Jasper and he was on his feet. He had been waiting for the call for more than a day and he did not know if its delay was a positive or negative sign; Alice wasn’t sure either. He crushed his phone to his ear, saying, “Edward,” embarrassed of his fervency in front of the girls but not enough to smother it.

Edward said, “Is everything okay? Are you safe to talk? Where are you?”

“Slow down, slow down, it’s alright,” he said, and went into the hallway where he could be alone.

“Are you alright?”

“We’re fine, we’re in a hotel in Phoenix. Very little to report. Please, slow down. Tell me where you are.”

He heard Edward take a slow shuddery breath. “British Columbia. Near the border now.”

There was a little quiet moment, Jasper experimentally trying to push calm at him over the phone. He’d never tried it before. “Is it working?” He asked.

“I can’t tell you how good it feels to hear your voice,” Edward said finally, his own voice low and velvet-edged. “It feels even better than I thought it would.”

Something turned over in Jasper’s stomach. “Yours too. I’ll talk as much as you want,” he promised. “Just tell me what’s been happening.”

“We traced the tracker north. He’s extremely clever, extremely dangerous. Doubling back through lakes and snowpack. He’s been very hard to trace. We’re all alright, of course. He hasn’t gotten anywhere near us. I’m only calling now because we think we’ve lost the trail entirely.” He sighed and was quiet for a moment. “I’m ashamed to tell you this. It feels like a tremendous failure.”

“Don’t say that,” Jasper said, but his heart sank. “We’ll find him.”

“I don’t have your tactical skills.” They were quiet for a moment, just listening. Then Edward said, “Indulge me, my selfishness, for a second.”

“Do you want to know what I’m wearing?” It helped immensely, Jasper found, to imagine Edward’s face as he heard this.

He huffed, embarrassed but happy too. “Don’t torture me like this, while we’re apart. Do it later.”

“Later we won’t be apart,” Jasper said, aware of the intensity in its voice, not able to help it.

“No.” Edward sounded breathless.

“How should I indulge you, then?”

“Just—tell me where you are, right now. What you can see.”

God. The desire to be with him, to not have to describe anything, was overwhelming, physically unbearable. Jasper’s mouth filled with venom, a confused biological reaction that didn’t directly correspond to anything. For a moment he couldn’t speak.

“Jasper?” He sounded concerned. There was pleasure to the point of pain in hearing Edward say his name.

“I’m in the hallway of a La Quinta Inn,” he said finally. “There’s chaotic carpet, bad hotel art. Too much air conditioning. I just went out to get Bella something to eat. Otherwise we’ve just be=en here.”

“So no signs?”

“Nothing. Just waiting.”

They listened to each other breathe for a moment. Then Edward said, “What are you wearing?”

Jasper’s laugh was sudden and genuine. “The same thing I was wearing the last time you saw me, Ted. Tell me where you are. What you see.”

“I’m in the woods. Near a highway. Carlisle and Emmett are down the hill, giving me privacy. They absolutely insisted.”

“They’re romantics.”

“One word for it.” There was background noise over the line: trucks rushing by, birdsong and trees rustling. Being away from him was more painful than Jasper could have thought possible.

“Do you think he knows we’re here? Alice saw him going south.”

Edward sighed. “It’s possible. I wish I’d gotten a better read on his thoughts. Every time we got in range, he’d get away again. And that’s all—?”

“The visions haven’t been clear at all. She’s stressed and exhausted. Bella helps.

They help each other. But they’re afraid.” Jasper’s throat was tight, suddenly. He was aware he was clenching the phone too hard; he loosened his grip so it didn’t break. “That’s all we know, for now.” He twisted his hand through his hair, so deeply alone in the empty beige-and-brown hallway. It felt like dying.

“Jasper?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to get him. There’s seven of us and one of him. Bella will be alright.”

“Yes, I know. The visions will get clearer, too.”

“I just—you know.” Edward laughed humorlessly. “I’m not the right person for a pep talk. I’m given to moroseness to myself. But I just—I know she’s in danger, and Charlie, but I can only think about you. I just want you to save some of the calm for yourself, alright? Don’t deplete yourself to keep them calm. There’s no point in it.”

There was no pep talk like being told _I value your life the most_. “There’s no harm in me being depleted. I’ll bounce back, you know. If it helps them make the right choices. They’re—well you know what I’m going to say. They’re babies. I have to give my resources for it. It doesn’t harm me.”

Edward seemed to think for a moment. Jasper could nearly see the heavy frown at his brow, the rub of his index finger over his top lip, a whirlpool of thoughts, his and other people’s, always raging. Finally Edward said, “What if there was harm to it, for me? If it would harm me to exhaust yourself, would you save a little bit?”

Jasper bit the inside of his cheek until it hurt. “That’s a clever little trick.”

“Perhaps I’m cleverer when I’m away from you. Less distracted. More blood remaining in my head.”

Jasper was completely unprepared for this conversational tack. He flushed with heat for a moment, reconfiguring, and then said, “You’re trying to distract me.”

“I’m distracting you with the truth. Look, we’ve got to go, we think he might have gotten on a plane. We’re headed back to the border. Will you be alright?”

“Yes,” Jasper answered imprecisely, meaning _when I can touch you and not before. _“Caution, please.”

“You too. Keep a close eye on them. They’re only teenage girls, you know. But they’re teenaged like a fox.”

Jasper gave a choked little laugh. He felt the torrent of his own distorted feelings, the levies crashing, from hours of constant emotional management. “Yes.”

“Soon, Jazz, okay?”

“I love you,” he said, and then the line was disconnected.

When he got back in the room, he could tell at once that Alice was having a vision. Bella had pushed pen and hotel pad of paper into her hands, and she was drawing something, a room. Her breath was coming fast and thin. There was a new look of fear in Bella’s eyes. She hadn’t seen a vision like this before.

When Alice was done drawing, blinking herself back to the present, Bella blanched. “I know that place,” she said. “It’s five miles from here. I took dance there as a kid.”

Alice turned away from Bella, in a fruitless attempt to avoid frightening her more. “He’s going there. Today, maybe tomorrow.”

Jasper put his hands deep in his pockets. “Edward said he thought they’d lost the trail. That the tracker might have gotten on a plane.”

Alice got up and walked to the far wall, hands scrubbing over her face and scraping into her hair. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, her voice dim. “He’s too close.”

Jasper helplessly looked at Bella. They had been supposed to protect her, and they were at a loss, overwhelmed by their own fear, but how much they didn’t know. It occurred to him privately that if they had brought Edward, he could have scanned the perimeter of his mind-reading access, so they’d have a paltry few minutes of notice as the tracker drew ever closer.

Bella stood up too, her knees a little weak, her pulse fast, but none of this was evident in her voice. “We have to make a plan,” she said. “Check in with Rosalie about Charlie, and check in with my mom. I don’t want to risk her coming back to the city. I’ll be able to think more clearly if I know they’re both safe.”

It shouldn’t have been like this; she shouldn’t have to protect her parents. It was an awful inversion of the family dynamic, one that her association with the Cullens had caused. Jasper felt sick guilt wash through Alice and, silently apologizing to Edward, pushed a fresh wave of relief toward her. Instantly, she turned toward him and said, “_Don’t. _Don’t you dare. I deserve to feel all of this. Don’t protect me, Jazz.” There was more bitterness in her voice, more despair, than he had expected, and it made him feel sick too.

He gave Bella a chance to break in, but she was staring down at the drawing in her hands. He said, apologetic, “It’ll help you think clearly, make a plan.”

Alice sighed, neither agreeing or disagreeing.

The hotel phone rang, making Bella flinch and the other two glance at it. Jasper picked it up, quickly ascertained that it was Bella’s mother, and handed her the phone.

When she had said hello to her mother, all the color drained out of her face, and she went into the bathroom and shut the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter coming soon! Thanks so much for your comments and support. Come say hi at thegables.tumblr.com!


	25. Chapter Twenty-Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’d left a note in Alice’s bag on La Quinta Inn stationary that read, “I love you more than you know, I wouldn’t leave you for anything less, please don’t blame yourself.” She knew this was a letter of confession. During the long hot drive to the ballet studio, Alice’s and her mother’s faces blurred in her head and tears dripped off her chin. Edward had once told her that she was too powerful, and she realized now that this had been an eloquent way to describe a sacrifice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was really fun to work on! I guess i'm revealing myself as the Renee apologist I've always been... I have always found it interesting that Bella's melodramatic and iconique speech about being will to die for someone you loved is... not about her star-crossed vampire lover, but her mother. I always think that is an interesting note of complexity that tells us something interesting about Bella's character (even if SMeyer herself didn't really think it through.) So this chapter explores that idea a little more.

Would you die for your mother?

He meant it as a conundrum, an impossible moral question. It took Bella a moment to realize that he’d meant it this way, because her immediate response was, “When and where?”

Of course she would die for her mother. It did not make sense as a difficult question.

It did strike her that Alice, who had threatened violence against someone trying to hurt Bella, would not have the same reaction.

_Get away without them knowing_, James had said, and Bella’s response had almost been, _Well, of course. _Alice and Jasper were her jailers as well as her protectors, and they would not brook any attempt at escape.

Bella could imagine an argument with them about it, imagine the ruinous cruelty she could throw out. _Easy for you to say_, she could say to Alice’s righteous anger. _Easy for you to say, you don’t remember your mother_.

Bella would die before saying this to her girlfriend. But she would lie to her to save her mother too. She _did _remember her mother, too vividly, the sound of her voice and the feeling of her cheek pressed to Bella’s shoulder, her fingers carding through Bella’s hair, her saying, “Let’s go somewhere, let’s take an adventure,” but coming home as soon as Bella asked. Her chest hurt remembering her.

So she’d meet James. With this uncomplicated choice she could uncomplicate everything, protecting Alice and Edward and Jasper and their family from temptation and moral quandary. She would not have to ask anyone to make her a vampire. This was, of course, the thing she wanted most, so much that she was afraid of the desire and would not admit it to anyone.

Now she didn’t have to.

Soon after Bella had made this choice, Jasper had received another call from Edward, letting them know that he, Carlisle, and Emmett were coming on a plane to Phoenix. “The idea is that we’ll search here,” Jasper said, his eyes dark and slow, “and you girls can go somewhere else safe, on your own. Wherever you like.”

It would have bothered Bella to be called “you girls” by anyone else, but she felt the affection in the phrase when he said it. She turned to Alice, who was looking out the window through the tiny crack in the blackout curtains. She was so tense her shoulders were up around her ears. When Bella went over to her, Alice wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I hate to admit it,” she whispered, “But I’m glad Carlisle is coming.”

It was a shamefaced admission of childhood, and it shamed Bella too. Of course Alice remembered her parents—the people who had taken her in, oriented her to this new impossible life. Bella had not invented or owned the idea of having a mother. She hugged Alice around the shoulders, leaning most of her weight on her, clinging to her compact cold body. “Carlisle will be here,” she agreed, “Carlisle will be here soon.”

But Bella would not be. The next day, when they went to meet the three at the airport, she escaped via a two entrance bathroom, ran back through the airport, and got in a taxi. She’d left a note in Alice’s bag on La Quinta Inn stationary that read, “I love you more than you know, I wouldn’t leave you for anything less, please don’t blame yourself.” She knew this was a letter of confession. During the long hot drive to the ballet studio, Alice’s and her mother’s faces blurred in her head and tears dripped off her chin. Edward had once told her that she was too powerful, and she realized now that this had been an eloquent way to describe a sacrifice.

She forgot about this as soon as she heard her mother’s voice, saying her name in a panic. “Bella! Bella??!” She sounded just as afraid as she had on the phone. But then the recording went on. “Don’t run into the street like that, you crazy, you scared me.” She broke off into a breathless laugh. “Jeez, girly.” The sound of her mom laughing sounded so discordant in the dim, eerie environment of the empty ballet studio that it made Bella’s blood run cold.

“Mom?” She called, but as she did, she knew that her mother wasn’t there. The recording of her voice was 12 years old.

She heard the tracker a moment after he touched her. There was a searing pain in her wrist—no her leg—no, everywhere, and there was shattering glass and screaming and a low, guttural growl, and the feeling of her ear and jaw against hardwood. Then very little.

The most irritating thing, Bella thought, the worst part, is that I’m not going to see my mother before I die. I didn’t save her from anything. I threw away my sacrifice.

Then there was the hallucination of Alice’s hands on her face, at her hip, and the sound of wood being crushed. Carlisle’s voice said, “Bella, I need you to stay with me, stay right here with me. You’re doing wonderfully.” To someone else he hissed, “Morphine!”

Bella was only ears; she could only receive data, not make anything new. There was the sound of Alice’s voice, small and perfect, berating Bella and also telling her she loved her. There was Emmett grunting as he crushed something, and then Jasper, his accent thick in his distress, saying, “_Stay _outside, please, we’ve got him!”

“Bella,” Carlisle pleaded, and as he did something to her leg she screamed. Maybe she had already been screaming. “Alice, you’re going to have to do it. If I don’t tourniquet now—”

“I can’t.” Alice’s voice was broken, hoarse, empty. “I’ll kill her.”

“She’ll die if you don’t. She’ll—. You can do it.”

There was a long shuddery breath, and then the familiar sensation of Alice’s lips ghosting along her skin. Pain, pain, pain. “I’ll fix this, Bella,” Alice whispered, “I’ll make it go away.” She bit down. Bella screamed until the room fell away and pain fell away and she was lost.

When she found the world again and opened her eyes, she saw her mother’s face.

~~~

Renee’s eyes filled with tears. “Hey baby,” she said softly. “You’re here.”

“Mom?”

“It’s alright now. I’m here, you’re here. We’re in the hospital. You’re gonna be okay.” Her fingers were soft and light and familiar on Bella’s cheek, tracing a line up her face. It had to be broken by something—there was oxygen tubing in her nose.

Every inch of Bella’s body hurt. She jerked instinctively and felt a surge of pain down one leg. There was a soft sound of alarm from the corner of the room. Bella managed to turn her head: Alice. In unfamiliar clothes, curled up on a hospital chair, with deep shadows under her eyes and a watchful, fraught expression.

It was too much to take in. Bella felt overwhelmed, both buoyed and destroyed, by her mother’s presence. “What happened?”

Renee glanced sideways at Alice for a half-second, blinking away her tears. “You fell down the stairs in a hotel. Alice and her father came down to try to convince you to go back to Forks. But you fell through an actual _window_. That’s my girl, eh?” Her fingers brushed over Bella’s hair.

Alice got up in a fluid movement, taking care not to move too quickly. She was wearing a crisp black linen shirtdress, inevitably two sizes too big, and looked even more like a chic and morose goth than usual. “I’ll leave you two on your own,” she said quietly, with an intent look at Bella that made her chest pang. Alice left the room; Renee and Bella watched her go.

“She brought you to the hospital and called me,” Renee whispered, as if Alice could still hear. She could, probably, if she’d wanted to, but undoubtedly she was giving them privacy. “I got on the first plane I could out here.”

“Wait, how long did that take? How long was I asleep?” Bella tried to shift her weight on the mattress, and was greeted with another roll of pain up one side. She flinched.

“Just take it really easy, baby. You broke your leg, and a rib or two. They had to sedate you through the worst of the pain—you’ve been asleep for two days.” Renee wouldn’t stop touching Bella; her hands were soft and rubbing tiny circles into Bella’s unharmed wrist.

“I can’t believe this.” Bella’s mind was racing—what had happened to James—where were the other Cullens—had the bite on her hand—what had Alice done—what did her mother know? “I feel like an idiot.”

“Oh, babe, don’t say that. It could happen to anyone. I guess it’s been a pretty tumultuous time. You—left Forks in a hurry. But Alice.” She glanced over her shoulder, but Alice wasn’t in appearance. “Alice seems like a really good friend.”

There was an invitation in the statement: _help me know you. _Also a question: _who _is_ that girl_? When Bella heard the invitation and the question, her eyes spontaneously filled with tears. She tried to take a deep breath, but it sent a sharp sear of pain through her chest and the breath was ragged and thin. The tears spilled over her cheeks. “She’s my girlfriend,” she said hoarsely.

A light of understanding illuminated on Renee’s face. It was warm and messy and forged ahead. Bella was reminded of her mother’s magic, the thing that made her irresistible and compulsively lovable despite her disorganization and flightiness. Renee put her hand, warm and dry, on Bella’s face. “Oh babe, of course she is. Of course she is.”

This affirmation made Bella suck in a shuddery sob, powerless to stop the pain in her chest. She cried, ugly and snotty and wet, for a few minutes. It was not so much about coming out or being gay or even about her mother’s presence. Or about nearly being murdered or transformed by a hellbent vampire. It was just—everything.

“Shhh,” Renee murmured, pushing Bella’s hair back from her face. “I know. I know.”

Bella struggled to get ahold of herself. “You really don’t care?”

“That you have a girlfriend? Or that you fell out a hotel window? Oh, baby, of course I don’t care. She seems like a lovely girl. She hasn’t left your side in days. I think she’s barely slept. She clearly loves you a lot. You gave us both a scare.”

Bella took a shaky breath, moving ever so slightly to test her soreness. She felt bolted into the bed. “She’s amazing,” she whispered, “I don’t deserve her.”

“Hush,” Renee said hurriedly. “Don’t be ridiculous. She adores you. Alice? Isn’t that right?”

Alice appeared in the doorway in a flash, her face tentative. Her hair was pulled back from her face with her trademark butterfly clips, as if she couldn’t bear to be distracted by it. She looked ghostly under the hospital florescent lights, with her dress banging around her thin knees. Bella felt a complicated split in her wanting—the comfort and authority of her mother; the intensity and love and _information _of Alice.

“Come in here,” Renee said, giving a little laugh at Alice’s dubious face. “You girls should have a chance to talk. Don’t let her move too much, Alice, will you? Cheer her up for me, my girl’s had a pretty rough couple of days.” Renee stood with a creaky _oof. _“I’ll go and get a cup of coffee. I could use one. Alice, can I get you a cup of coffee?”

Alice looked at the floor. “No—Mrs. Dwyer—that’s okay, I’m fine.”

Bella repressed a smile even as her heart twisted.

“Alright, that’s just fine. Renee touched Alice lightly on the shoulder as she passed by her out of the room. As soon as she was gone, Alice was at the side of the bed, her face pressed into the edge of Bella’s pillow. She seemed afraid to touch her. She breathed into the cheap hospital cotton.

“Hold my hand,” Bella whispered. “That’s for a start.”

Alice’s small, chilled hand found Bella’s, tangling through the heart rate monitor and IV, and held it firmly. “Bella—” she murmured. “I don’t know what to say.”

Bella didn’t want to _say _anything. She just wanted to breathe in Alice’s scent, feel the cool press of her touch. “My ribs hurt,” she said. “Be my icepack?”

Alice huffed, almost a blush, and gently, very gently, pulled down the blanket slightly and laid the flat of her hand against Bella’s side. The cold made her flinch for a moment, but then it felt good. “I’ll do everything I can to make you feel better,” Alice said. “Before I—send you off with your mother.”

Bella attempted to bolt upright, and sent a hundred monitors beeping and a flash of pain through her leg and side.

“_Stop that_,” Alice said, her hand coming up to Bella’s shoulder, pressing her back.

“What the _hell _do you mean, send me off? You can’t—you don’t—you. You want to get rid of me.” She was crying again, unavoidably, tears hot and stinging in her eyes.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alice whispered fiercely, her lips on Bella’s forehead. “Don’t be—. Oh Bella. I want nothing more than to stay with you. But it’s dangerous. I nearly cost you your life. Your—humanity. You don’t deserve that.”

“I don’t deserve you, either. You _saved _my life. You can’t blame yourself. And you can’t leave me, please. Please don’t.”

Alice closed her eyes, pain and love in her face. The overwhelming pallor and purplish shadows under her eyes did nothing to disrupt the elegant prettiness of her face, the delicacy of her features. She bit her lip. Then she folded forward and kissed Bella’s forehead again. “Alright,” she said. “alright.” And then, in a deeper voice, with a deeper honesty: “Where else would I go?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Come say hi at thegables.tumblr.com.


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